


the job that you were meant to do

by HelloAmHere



Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Awesome Pepper Potts, Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, F/F, Falling In Love, Genderswap, Jarvis (Iron Man movies) is a Good Bro, Non-Linear Narrative, Origin Story, Tony Stark Needs a Hug, also Pepper Potts/Stark Industries let's be real, fem!TonyStark, genius billionaire lesbian philanthropist, military and corporate strategy, not how corp structures work but it's a comicbook ok, which tbh are kind of the same thing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-21
Updated: 2019-04-21
Packaged: 2020-01-23 12:56:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 26,507
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18550204
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HelloAmHere/pseuds/HelloAmHere
Summary: If Tony was a shape she was a bullet rocketship, like the ones on sixties tv shows, elegantly absurd. She was the thin line of a missile stretched out toward space, destruction repurposed, an explosion aimed at adventure. //Pepper takes a job and has a very clear plan for what she's going to get out of it. But Stark Industries is a little bigger than expected.





	the job that you were meant to do

**Author's Note:**

> Me, near-on eleven years after Iron Man came out, watching it on the couch with my girlfriend: Tony Stark should be a queer woman 
> 
> My girlfriend: I don’t think that would solve any–
> 
> Me in an ever-increasing volume while pounding my fists into our couch: Tony! Stark! SHOULD BE! A! QUEER WOMAN!
> 
> *** 
> 
> Considerable plot remixing of Iron Man, mostly to answer the mental question I've always harbored: "what was Pepper doing all that time?"

The first time Tony went missing, Pepper lost two nights of sleep and three carefully curated favors that she’d been holding onto since grad school.  

Pepper didn’t love the fact that the very first crisis was all it took for Stark Industries to drag her down from the moral high ground with their oily fists, much as Rhodey had predicted and Pepper had denied. And she _hated_ that it involved making phone calls to somebody’s dad and using a pitch of voice that she had previously reserved only for ensuring on-time pizza delivery and, very occasionally, getting Tony to actually pay attention to some detail of operational importance. 

But she had been new, six months employed at Stark Industries _c/o Tony Stark, personal assistant at large._ And she had been panicky, awake at three in the morning envisioning a world with a hole in it shaped like Tony. 

If Tony was a shape she was a bullet rocketship, like the ones on sixties tv shows, elegantly absurd. She was the thin line of a missile stretched out toward space, destruction repurposed, an explosion aimed at adventure. 

Tony turned out to be on somebody’s goddamn private island _._ She was laughing herself sick failing to crack coconuts with a machete (there was grainy video that surfaced within three hours of the press statement and caused a stock plunge), forgetting to charge her phone, and ignoring a board meeting. 

She was an orphan and a user and a genius, and nobody was gonna do a damn thing about any it because of that last one. She was a broken system, and Pepper may not have been a _genius_ , but she didn’t do those. 

Pepper set a calendar notification on her phone for six months in the future. Nobody expected anybody to last _c/o Tony Stark_ longer than a single quarter anyway, and Pepper liked exceeding expectations just enough to make herself a shoe-in for the next job, the real job, the one where she’d actually work for somebody she _liked._

Tony came off the plane dressed, by some miracle, and smelling like a mixture that Pepper decided not to interrogate. Tony’s long dark eyelashes stuck together like they’d been glued by coconut splatter. She slid across Pepper’s lap getting in on the wrong side of the car, which wasn’t a surprise because Tony found a way to be obnoxious like most people found a way to breathe. 

But she’d been ignoring Pepper for six months and three days, so it _was_ a surprise when Tony stopped in the middle of clambering, an inch from Pepper’s face and knees to either side of her thighs. 

“You look terrible, assistant lady,” Tony said. She smelled like a pina colada gone rancid.  

“Rumor was my boss lady was kidnapped,” Pepper said evenly. 

She’d taken a break during Tony’s flight time to shower, the first thirty minutes of real time off in three days, and she’d still managed to pull her hair up in her customary sleek ponytail and show up to the private jet with a coffee. But she’d conceded to the burning sleep deprivation in her brain and was wearing jeans. 

“Some people would’ve counted that a good day’s work,” Tony said. “Taken a friday. Long weekend. Skiing at Tahoe? No, wait, it’s not the season. Oh, I should buy a snow machine. I should buy a ski resort and make it snow there all the time. How delightfully, refreshingly sincere of you to give a shit.”  

“You’re getting taxed a lot this year, it seemed a shame for the schools to miss that,” Pepper said. 

“Did they finally figure out how make a new bracket just for little ol’ me?” Tony asked. 

And Tony was an obnoxious demon but she was also a genius so she probably didn’t miss any of it, her eyes flickering around Pepper’s face and down to the jeans, before she threw herself into the other side of the backseat so hard that Pepper winced. 

“Go home and sleep for a week, Ms. Potts, or I’ll fire you,” Tony said. 

“Will do, Ms. Stark,” Pepper said. She'd started out half a year ago with _Dr._ but Tony had laughed her out of a conference room. 

Tony grinned, at the floor and not at Pepper. Of course. It still made Tony go from castaway to supermodel, that magnet glorious TONY STARK from all the magazines covers. Tony was beautiful like a lightning bolt, startling, searing and then collapsing into dark. 

It was really, stupidly, annoying. Pepper sighed and drank the coffee.  

Tony folded herself into a ball on the seat, slammed the tinted shade button for the windows, and closed her eyes. Pepper realized Tony was barefoot, grime between her toes. She never wore a seatbelt, surprising for both a world-class engineer and someone whose entire immediate family died in a car crash. Or maybe not surprising. Maybe Tony had considered all the relative weights of the various risk base rates, and made a logical contextual decision given that.

Pepper sat in the dark car and thought with a gentle bleakness about how you don't always get to pick _who you like._

 

***

  

The thirty-seventh time Tony went missing, Pepper was ignoring a digital mountain of emails blinking URGENT in Stark-red approved brand cmyk. 

She was in her office. It was really Tony’s office, but since Tony made it to LA as often as the rain, Pepper had commandeered the corner view and the expansive desk. She even kept an extra pair of flats in the bottom desk drawer. Tony had abandoned an old bottle of scotch in there. Pepper occasionally amused herself by imagining Tony opening it and pouring it out for whatever flash-in-the-pan investor rat or action star was trying to sleep with her that day with the fruitless resilience of rich, straight men. He’d probably taste the shoes and call it _peaty._

Military security meant comms always got censored and shut down and weird, so she didn’t really notice when Tony didn’t check in, even though the desert was in the back of her mind. Rhodey was in charge over there, for one thing, and Rhodey and Pepper had a Make Sure To Watch Tony understanding, communicated primarily through shared eyerolls and sympathetic sighs. So Pepper avoided emails, reviewed a gala schedule, and didn’t worry. 

After, what she would think about wasn’t the interruption, the galling alert delivered in a military monotone, nor the yelling of the liaisons that was the next awful thirty minutes. She wouldn’t think about the snap into action, the flurry of Stark Industry resources, and the hours of laser-focused desperation burning out into hopelessness.  

She wouldn't even think of the explosion, captured on a Stark drone tape for a mocking forty-two seconds of footage before it got shot down in the firefight: the rolling Hummers and the wretched, doll-like snap of the bodies. 

Instead, what she would think about was that afternoon sitting in the office. She would think about it too much. It became a frozen memory, the mundane _before_. Sitting at the dual monitors avoiding emails, drawing on a gala place setting with one of Tony’s weighted architectural pencils, using it for the future pleasure of Tony’s annoyance. 

It was preposterous to think that she could’ve done something even if she had known. If she’d somehow realized, faster than the military and the company. But it still lodged in her throat and the pit of her stomach. Guilt and anger feel much the same, glued by fear. 

Most of all there was the feeling that she had _failed to catch it,_ that they’d all failed to catch it. That they’d just let Tony spin out into the desert like a firework. That everybody always _let_ _Tony go_ because it was easier, and because they wanted everything from her except for her. Wanted the frantic, crystalline visions of Tony’s beautiful mind more than they wanted to watch her or keep her safe. That they sat back in stolen offices and breathed a little easier, not taking responsibility. 

Like there wasn’t a whole world out there that wanted to quench that kind of light.

Tony was impossible to predict but Tony wasn’t someone who ever stayed _quiet._ That should've been enough to know _._

 

_***_

 

The fifteenth time Tony went missing, she’d gone on a field trip with an experimental metals dig team and forgotten to tell anybody. Pepper had gotten better at finding her by that point. She tagged into JARVIS’ location reports and reassured herself over a warmed-up piece of banana bread from the fifth floor New York office. 

“A saturation scan indicates these markings are most likely dirt, not abrasions,” JARVIS said as Pepper flipped through a couple of satellite images with a buttery finger. Tony was knee deep in dirt and _singing._  

“If Tony isn’t making a mess, is she really Tony,” Pepper said. 

“You are acclimating more rapidly than previous personal assistants,” JARVIS said. JARVIS sounded approving by default, possibly built-in as a conscious contrast to Tony’s deficiencies, possibly in the solidarity of those who seemed destined forever to assist. Pepper still smiled.  

She made a note in her growing mental library of things that seemed to make Tony actually, lastingly, happy. These data were too precious and guarded to even share with JARVIS. 

Tony brought back a bottle of dirt. It sat on the Shelf of Shame in the office, where Pepper put everything else that Tony had started bringing back with no discernible pattern except for the way she grinned when she handed it to Pepper. A bottle of dirt that might as well have come from her front yard, a rotating paperweight, a kite with its string cut off, and a ring with three stones and some metal that looked a little dingy which Pepper had tried to take to a shop to then turn the proceeds into charity.  

The shop told her very politely and urgently that the ring was designer one-of-a-kind and the metal was shot through with an exceedingly uncommon element and that the price would, well, take some time and possibly European consultation with NASA to hammer out.

Tony ignored her when she asked about it, and promptly did something so heinously calibrated to offend human decency that it slipped Pepper’s mind. So the ring stayed on the shelf in the office. Pepper looked at it sometimes over a milk-alternative latte from the downstairs baristas. It reflected light from the morning sun when it came through the window, and sometimes a thin line of copper shone between the tight gears. That was probably what Tony had noticed about it in the first place, not the jewels or the metal but that tiny sliver of useless wire reminiscent of something electrical. 

Pepper spent two weeks cleaning up after Tony offending an entire floor of program managers and two members of NATO. Tony came back from Switzerland with the designs for a new armoring technology, adaptive joints that could thicken just before impact and soften just before movement, so everyone benevolently forgave her. Everyone but Pepper, obviously, who made judgmental eyebrows from the back of Rhodey’s briefing, and didn’t laugh at any of Tony’s jokes. 

“Hey, Pep, hey Pep,” Tony said, obnoxious and obnoxiously grabbing Pepper by the elbow on the way out to the helicopters, but her strong fingers were light against Pepper’s blue button-down, barely plucking at the fabric, “I need you. Get me some tickets to something tonight. Something live and cool and not bougie LA.” 

“You’ve got an emergency makeup NATO briefing and it’s an important one,” Pepper said coolly. 

“ _Is_ it though, is _NATO_ ever important,” Tony said. She was in hungover-Tony gear that day, a loose Queen tshirt with a jagged cutout in the back and her slouchiest black jeans that hung low on her hips, although Pepper thought that was more because Tony was tall and Amazonian and never bothered to get clothes properly tailored, than because she was showing anything off. Regardless, there would be a dozen shots in a dozen tabloids of the slivered inches of Tony’s tan, gorgeous hipbone. 

Pepper looked down at her notes. “ _Some_ people consider large collections of nation states to be important.” 

“Do you?” Tony asked, suddenly genuine. 

Her eyes were always bright and hard to look away from, even though Pepper had been practicing for near on two years now. She still had the calendar notification with its clipped little _send in resignation letter_ title. She kept it on, moved it six months forward every time it pinged her phone, maybe because she liked the reminder that she was very professionally in charge of all of this. 

Pepper shrugged. The helicopter noise was blaring down the runway and Pepper had stopped at the yellow line, but Tony was just standing there, leaning in. Pepper had to raise her voice just under shouting to be heard.  

“At the very least, Stark Industries still needs customers,” she yelled. “At the very most, I think you still like having a say in what’s going on in the world. Sometimes.” 

“Sometimes,” Tony echoed. “Nothing bougie though, I’m tired of people like me, I want like a little dive bar kind of--” 

“I’ve sent three options to your pad, and all of them have estimated under a hundred guests tonight,” Pepper said. JARVIS had helpfully added a small map with a pro and cons list to each venue. “But I suggest the underground, pop punk show. They’re still pretty unknown and a little unpolished but they’ve got talent. And they start at midnight so you can do NATO, duck out before the assholes start getting drunk, and still make the show.” 

“Huh,” Tony said, and if there was a thrill at surprising Tony Stark that still hadn’t vanished under the bureaucratic nightmare that was _managing_ Tony Stark, Pepper kept it hidden underneath a perfectly tilted nod, a perfectly professional assistant-level smile.  

The people at the helicopter made frantic, _we’ve got an air control tower here_ gesture. Tony ignored them and squinted at Pepper. 

“You’re using operant conditioning on me again,” she accused. 

“The venue for the secret show is in the social neighborhood typically referred to as the gayborhood,” Pepper said. “JARVIS has put out a believable report for a rising pop star sighting on the other side of town, which should draw all paparazzi resources by eleven pm.” 

Tony rocked back on her heels, her face inscrutable. 

“Just a fun educational fact,” Pepper added. 

“I liked making this stupid robo-joint,” Tony said, swinging a long arm back toward the crates of alpha prototypes. “It was fun. Been a while since making something was fun. Did you know that it’s still standard firing strategy to target joints, like it’s the middle ages? Still the weakest parts of armor, the parts that we need to make it dynamic. Can’t move and be safe at the same time. Seemed wrong.” 

“Can I do anything else for you?” Pepper said, and by now she’d trained Tony to know that meant _get your ass to work._ Working for Tony felt, truthfully, less like being in charge and more like the entire world was swirling around an impulsive toddler who was equally likely to change the laws of physics or throw a tantrum when she got bored. 

“Assign a team to repurpose the joints for nursing homes,” Tony said, “Probably Mark and his team. They did limb work a few years ago when we had that medical contract. Make them hire a postdoc with a speciality in phantom limb pain. Not engineering, _pain._ Everybody always forgets to deal with the psychosomatic integrations. They don’t care with soldiers but, I thought it might matter. For the oldsters. We’re gonna make a hundred thousand for the military so I think we can ship a thousand out to nursing homes or something. I don’t know. Have JARVIS figure out some numbers that won’t have to go through the board.”  

“Got it,” Pepper said, ten different academic health labs already rotating through her mind. 

“Did you know that women are prime candidates for osteo-regrowth therapies, but they're never in the clinical trials?” Tony said, not exactly a question.  

Pepper brushed strands of hair out of her face that were being flung around by the helicopter draft, and nodded like she knew.

“It's because the military owns all the bio armor work,” Tony said, “And no one one in the military puts armor on old women. But you know. _We_ could. Requisition a subdepartment for it. Put it under experimental medical and Obadiah won't ever check on it.” 

“I like that,” Pepper said. “That's a good idea.”

Tony smiled, not the magazine grin. Small enough to be almost tentative, the way that shy kids smile when they're not sure about what they're doing. When they're not sure about anything at all, and the whole world turns on the reaction you give them. It knocked all the breath out of Pepper’s chest. 

“Maybe we could program a dance routine into the joints,” Tony said, “Imagine a thousand old person dance crew...”  

“Absolutely not,” Pepper said firmly, and Tony sighed. 

Then she leaned forward and _kissed Pepper on the cheek,_ which was so fucking absurd and yet also so very Tony that Pepper just blinked, frozen in the moment. It was soft and warm, the corner of Tony’s mouth brushing against Pepper’s cheek, Tony’s fingers still caught in her elbow crease, tugging her forward. 

Tony was taller than Pepper was, and wider in the shoulders, and they usually never stood close enough for this to matter but right now it made Pepper feel strangely delicate, like the hanging glass shards in the stupid modern art mobile that scared half the staff in the downtown office. Tony smelled like something ginger, something spiced, probably a thousand dollar hair oil that Tony would use once and then forget about, or give to the woman from the cleaning service. Once Tony had given Pepper’s _phone_ to a woman from the cleaning service. 

Tony let Pepper’s arm go and whirled in the same motion, running down the runway. “Bye honey, tell JARVIS not to wait up,” she yelled. 

“I am fortunate in that I do not require extended periods of unconsciousness, only monthly routine maintenance in staggered intervals,” JARVIS said mellifluously in Pepper’s earpiece. “Tangentially, calculated recommended sleep patterns for your age and demographic cohort indicate at _least_ two additional hours, based on when you came in this morning, Ms. Potts.” 

“This company would fall apart without me,” Pepper said. 

“I am in agreement, which is why I am relying on your functionality,” JARVIS said. 

“Flattery doesn’t make up for invasiveness,” Pepper said, “Not even when I keep in mind Tony’s influence on your design.” 

JARVIS did an admirable facsimile of a sigh. “This _company_ is not the thing that would fall apart without you. I am certain you are far too good at your work to be unaware of this.”  

“You’re fortunate that you don’t have a body vulnerable to retaliation,” Pepper said, because she couldn’t respond to the other thing. JARVIS made an agreeing hum in her ear, but Pepper supposed she might as well change the wakeup alarm on her phone before he took it upon himself to do it for her. 

The secret was that there was no secret. Managing Tony was a thing only Tony ever thought was really happening. Really all there was to do was ride the wake of Tony's gorgeous frantic brain and suppress the overwhelm until the helicopters took off. But Pepper was sure as hell never gonna let her see that. 

 

***

 

A month and a half after Tony’s resurrection, Pepper was making the executive decision to duck out of another financials meeting to get thai for lunch before she hurled herself into the sea. JARVIS would doubtless send a sub out before she hit the waves, and there'd be new decisions to make before they even docked. 

Neither financials nor Pepper knew how to conquer the unbearable load of work they had in front of them, changing a company from the inside-out and the top-down, like terraforming a planet. A planet with _opinions_. Pepper didn’t even know what she was _doing_ in these meetings, only that in between coffees and dry cleaning and special orders to custom European car mechanics and chasing tech through laboratories, she had somehow allowed herself become something more than Personal Assistant, something that the company seemed incapable of either defining or ignoring. Something _trusted._  

Pepper was used to being the most competent person in the room but she wasn’t sure what to do with this: the day after the press conference, Tony had pushed her out of the garage door with greasy hands and wild hair and said, “I need you to do this for me.” And Pepper had gone back to Stark Industries and tried to disguise the fact that she was still little more than a bundle of limp relief tied together with anger at all the _incompetence_. 

But it was Tony who had been lost. Whatever Tony needed, Pepper knew herself well enough to not argue with the fact that she'd try to make it happen. It was the job, wasn’t it? 

If nothing else, Pepper had become the closest conduit the _rest_ of Stark Industries could find to Tony Stark, post-rescue. She’d become at some point when she hadn’t been watching, a known and accepted figurehead to every division at Stark Industries. She’d had an email that morning about janitorial in the small arms contracting warehouse. She'd somehow been the person to make a judgment call about health coverage payouts ( _all of it,_ Pepper decided with a quick and gleeful kind of _what the fuck,_ signing Tony's permission-granted-digital-don't-bother-me-Pep-signature and extending the plans through at least the next year no matter whether Stark Industries made bombs or planes or those seaweed-based biodegradable straws. 1099s to pensioners from the old days to domestic partners, _all of it_ ). Inexplicably, she’d also been invited to some kind of elaborate lunch carpool email thread from the third-level administrative assistant staff.

Pepper tried, these days, not to feel like JARVIS.  

And on top of all that, there had been strange stuff on the news since Stark Industries stopped shipping weapons: an unexplained disruption to one of the big military contractors, a blow-out to an entire prison complex. And then suddenly, court cases: rendited political prisoners who found themselves stateside and refusing to say who brought them. Rhodey had looked strained about it, and given flight exercise responses at a temporary podium.  

The afternoon was hot and sticky and it crept under the collar of her stiff white button-down. Pepper could feel it everywhere, like a tidal change, and not just from Stark Industries. It felt big and distracting on top of the impossibility of the actual job that had a stranglehold on Pepper’s life and yet she couldn't stop noticing it all. Shifting politics everywhere, like a dozen puzzles pieces yet to fit. 

At least there was a thai place four blocks from the Malibu satellite office. Pepper had a cold, and Tony Stark was holed up in her mansion _making stuff_ with a manic gleaming grin and had never been known to explain herself at the best of times. Pepper had thirty thousand moving figments in her mind made mostly of stupid, politically-motivated executive vice presidents, but also a frisson under her skin that hadn't gone away, not since Tony came back.  

Pepper was crossing the intersection and thinking of all of it. Later, it would feel like another moment, frozen in time. Later, it would seem like the first real inkling that all the economic powers in the world were nothing more than a _distraction._ There was a cluster of people at the window, and what pulled Pepper towards them was how silent they all were. 

The news offices had a scrolling marquee and a mounted Stark Enterprise Ready screen in their window display, and there in 4k+ ultra def glory, there it was: a burning figure in metal, and _it could fly._  

Everybody gasped. It was hours old, footage only just emerged from a pocket of the world that had little wifi and fewer cell towers. Pepper couldn't look away, no one could look away. It wasn't an army or a paramilitary or a gesturing, murderous prince. It was like a statue come to life. 

It landed in the middle of what would later prove to be a refugee camp cover on an arms black market. It landed and took out ten men, then twenty, then thirty. 

There were _kids in that village_ , Pepper realized, joined with the numbly predictable dismay of the audience, although of course they all should've known. It still fired the mammalian nervous system to _see it_. She'd _known_ about the terrorist takeovers and the Ten Rings but there was that real kid on the screen, features clear in the high def screen, throwing thin desperate arms around an adult, both of them sharp lines in the cloud of dust. 

A gun to his head. Three guns to his head. It was absurd, a horrible contrast, bare skin and the kid's cheap sneakers against the gleaming black metal weapons of the terrorists.  

And the statue _moved._ Pepper didn't know whether it was too fast for the frame rate or a fault in the broadcast or actual _technology_ \-- _nothing armored moves that fast,_ thought the part of Pepper's brain that had been arguing in engineering labs on Tony's behalf for the past two years-- _nothing that we knew about._

Either way, in an impossible blink the terrorists were on the ground. The village was a riot of movement. People pouring out from the caravan where they'd been held hostage, guns useless on the ground. 

The California lunch crowd, watching open-mouthed hours after the fact, was rustling with noise. 

“Is it one of ours?” A woman on Pepper's left asked. 

“It's a drone,” somebody said.  

“Please,” his friend scoffed, “Are you shitting me?” 

“It's a robot,” another woman said, and Pepper thought _no it's not because we would've built it, we would've, and AI reco is good but it's not that good, that thing is strategic, it's separated civilians, it blasted ten more men with a single sweeping motion and a targeting system HOLY FUCK._

“JARVIS,” Pepper whispered to her earpiece, but he didn't answer. Probably a deadspot with all the concrete. 

THE IRON MAN, a chryon flashed as the broadcast played again. Pepper wondered vaguely if they were going to trademark that. 

“Yeah!” Somebody cheered. The crowd moved, feet stomping, unsure. The news commentary was already following the title on the bottom of the screen with warnings: mysterious figure, unauthorized attack, details unclear.  

“Yeah!” The crowd cheered, more and more voices joining in. Hands clapped, and feet stomped, and halfway around the world, _somebody had fucking done something_. “Yeah!” 

 

***

 

Pepper saw the Jericho before they took it overseas and lost it along with Tony _._ Or at least she saw its philosophical core: code spread out on three monitors and Tony bouncing between them like a racketball, hardware spread out on a massive laboratory table like an unresolved dinosaur skeleton from a paleo dig, the shiny pieces of precious, highly charged metals that Tony had absently stuck into the back pocket of her jeans and nearly given to a downtown vendor in exchange for a bacon-wrapped hot dog.  

Tony, Pepper had reflected, was _infuriating_ in a way that very few women allowed themselves to be. Pepper had watched her move through the chambered lab and only realized afterward how long she'd stopped there to watch, so long her knees had stiffened from the uneven floor of the warehouse.  

Regardless, like everything else that really _shone_ at Stark Industries, the Jericho missile system was really Tony’s, from its hardware skeleton to its software brain. But Tony going had raised high hell with a particular segment of Rhodey's world that he refused to get explicit about, not even on the floor of the VIP lounge with Pepper where they spent most Wednesday nights together, being stood up by Tony instead of briefing her.  

“You better stock up on ibuprofen,” Pepper said wisely, biting at the lip of the only socal cider she could tolerate. If she chipped a tooth in this job, JARVIS would probably just order her a better mouth. “You and Tony, bro-time in the desert with the bombs.”

“Pray for me,” Rhodey said. Tony had gone on plenty of military visits with Rhodey before. But never as deep, and never as far, and never to lead a weapons demo for the highest priced output Stark Industries had to offer.  

“You’ll make it happen.” 

“I make nothing happen,” Rhodey said dourly. “I serve at the joint pleasure of these United States and these Divided States of Stark. But yeah, pray for me,” and he paused to drink something horrid and hoppy-bitter. “No one ever had an issue when it was Obadiah going over there.” 

“Whatever could be the issue,” Pepper asked mockingly, “Is it that Tony’s likely to get caught up arguing engineering with one of your bomb guys?” 

Rhodey snorted. “S'far as I can tell, the _only observable difference_ is that Tony's smarter than Obadiah.” 

Pepper clinked her bottle gently against Rhodey's. Even money and genius couldn’t buy a world out of sexism, but meanwhile they had Rhodey.  

“Obadiah supported it, he made some phone calls,” Pepper said eventually. Pepper wasn’t sure if this was just because of the way that Obadiah had looked at the Jericho. Rarely did he venture into the labs anymore, but apparently a plains-leveling missile device was finally enough to awaken the engineer underneath the businessman.  

Tony herself had seemed ice cold about it. _Tony_ wanted to work on a new water-cooled engine, which had to be postponed until the missile was contracted and onto manufacturing. Tony had conceived the water system while in a hot tub on a ski trip. Pepper had not yet and would probably never recover from Tony barging into her hotel room at one in the morning, wet through an intricate black laced swimsuit and demanding that Pepper take notes down. But Rhodey deserved preservation from _some_ threats to his sanity. 

“You're the only other person that makes sense around this place, don’t let Tony suck you into her evil ways,” Pepper said, and Rhodey rolled his eyes. 

“I keep telling you I don't work here,” he explained patiently, “You’re the one we worry about.” 

“You might as well be on payroll,” Pepper pointed out, “You know Tony set up deposits into your retirement account.” 

Rhodey sighed. “You know what? Tony can be a little invasive.”  

Pepper laughed so hard it sent cider up the back of her nose.

  

***

  

It was Rhodey’s voice cutting in with actual human emotion that brought Pepper out of her trancelike emergency haze, the thirty-seventh time Tony went missing, the time it was real.  

“Pepper,” he said down the line, and Rhodey was a Colonel and a survivor of being shot down behind enemy lines and someone who flew fighters without breaking a sweat, but the man couldn’t hide feelings worth a damn. 

“I thought maybe when you called it wouldn’t be real,” Pepper said, blinking away tears, which was irritating, because tears weren’t _helpful._ “I thought you’d call, and tell me it was a training exercise, or Tony had tricked you so she could sneak off, that there would be some, some, some, some extreme sport event in Afghanistan she wanted to win--” 

“Pepper,” Rhodey interrupted her, sounding choked, and Pepper sniffed horridly and loudly into the line and they both, somehow, laughed. 

“How did this happen,” Pepper said, even though she knew how and the answer was _we didn’t fucking stop it._

“Tony would’ve told us if there was a race she needed to win, if only to boast about it,” Rhodey said. 

“You think?” Pepper said. 

Neither of them knew what to do. But through some trick or miracle Rhodey was Tony’s best friend, and that had made him something very similar to Pepper, close enough to stay with her, crouched in the closet of the third floor of the Stark Industries HR building getting snot all over her hand.  They sat in the silence together. 

“I know,” Rhodey said, “Everything’s being done, that can be done. Don’t take this on, Pepper. Not even you can fix everything.”  

“It’s been fifteen hours,” Pepper said, “They say that after two hours, over there--” 

“I know,” Rhodey said, “But she’s--” he made a strangled kind of scoff, “She’s valuable, Pepper, she’s really, pricelessly--she’s, they’ll see her as valuable, if they know who she is.”  

“Right,” Pepper said, staring blankly at the shelf in front of her face. 

The closet was full of paper stock. Six weeks ago Tony had gone on a minor tirade about transforming the government to digital. She’d been, unfortunately, at a government function, and even more unfortunately, drunk off her ass. Pepper had distracted her with the personal email for the sitting Chief Technology Officer of the United States, written on a napkin like they were at a goddamn bar on the westside and not a fifteen-k-a-plate fundraiser. Tony had said an earnest drunken _thank you_ and stuffed the napkin into her cleavage. 

Pepper had forgotten about it, and expected Tony would forget about it between dessert and another round of shots, but a week later there had been a meeting on Tony’s calendar with the Digital Service. It was, Pepper thought, utterly impossible to predict when Tony would care, and about what. 

“That’s exactly what I’m afraid of,” Pepper said.

 

***

 

The twentieth time Tony went missing, it was because she had started solving an equation to recapture energy lost in the storage process for wind power, and forgotten to attend her own weapons launch.

Not many people could reduce Tony Stark to silence but Obadiah was one of them. Pepper mostly couldn't hear the conversation through double paned glass but she couldn't help but see the line of Tony's right shoulder, canting up toward her ear like it did when she got genuinely stressed. A stiff shoulder was an artifact from a motorcycle accident, according to Tony's personal medical file. Pepper had the keys to _that,_ and Obadiah didn't.  

“Virginia, of course you’re still here burning the midnight oil,” Obadiah sighed, when Tony was gone and Stark Industries was gearing back into its usual operations, teams of reluctant electrical staff coming in to pick apart the half-rendered sketches of Tony's incoherent notes.  

“I've rescheduled the depot tour and Rhodey has confirmed delivery,” Pepper said. “We won't lose a shipment. The Navy's expected to double the order, even if it's late.” 

“Bless you,” Obadiah said, a person who routinely said such things despite everything that he was. 

Obadiah was widely called gentle by everyone at Stark Industries, a teddy bear for a billionaire. He wore wide-stripped shirts and suspenders, and booked a flight south to see his mother every two weeks.  

“She had an idea,” Pepper said, even if that was a ludicrous thing to say about Tony, who dripped ideas like it was an allergic reaction, who’d stabbed a butter knife into a cake during a business lunch because she needed to visualize an angle on a jet plane. 

Obadiah sighed. “And doesn’t Tony always,” he said. He was looking out the window in the dark, and the hallway light showed the deep creases around his eyes. Pepper couldn’t read anything at all in them. 

Obadiah had been Howard Stark's brother in every sense but biological. Pepper had worked for enough rich oligarchies that she knew they always ran like half-functional families anyway, but Stark Industries almost felt _designed_ for it. 

“Energy storage could save a lot of money,” Pepper said. And the planet. 

Obadiah snorted gently. Like Pepper had made a joke. Pepper made her face ready to smile, but he didn’t look back at her.

“Virginia, people you and I, I think we have a role to play here that isn't always recognized,” Obadiah said. Warm and weary, pitch perfect. “Tony… Tony will always be special. Tony doesn't always understand the _interests_ around her. I do my best to shield her but, heck, Virginia,” 

“I understand, it can be difficult,” Pepper said. She did her best to look like the discreet assistant with a brain tied up in a pencil skirt.The _assistant's_ shield, that one. Obadiah was just another titan for all his uncanny perception that made Pepper feel uneasily scrutinized, like all that charm was just a cover for an x-ray.  

“Of course you do,” he said. He turned, and Pepper’s smile was ready, no teeth. 

He patted Pepper on the arm. It was like they were in it together. “Of course. You really do. The thing about Tony is that she can get so caught up in the _ideas._ I love her like the daughter I never had, but she doesn't always see that things need to be kept running, you know?”

Obadiah smiled. “Of course you do. Just say, well, heck, Virginia you know as much about us as anyone. Tony trusts you, and that's good enough for me. You're an essential piece of keeping this place going, and I hope you know.” He paused for a beat, and withdrew his hand. Pepper didn’t move. 

“You know, Howard was the same way. Hard to tell the difference between Howard and the company. _Stark,_ that’s the name on the sign, isn’t it? But the company is more than them. It has to be.” 

“Tony relies on you,” Pepper said, because it was true, and Obadiah smiled again. 

“That’s kind of you,” he said. “And I wanted to tell you that Stark Industries relies on _us._ It can be easy to think that Tony and the company are the same, but they’re not. Tony isn’t your employer, not in the end. Ultimately, you and I, we serve the company. So I know I can count on you to let me know if Tony ever needs protection from a bad idea, right?”

Pepper looked out the window. From stories high over the city, the lights of cars looked like a strange, flowing river of reds and yellows. Tony had started driving motorcycles at sixteen, as soon as she’d started driving anything. She bought the fastest bike on the market at seventeen. She’d already been working at Stark Industries for three years, because at fourteen, Howard had pulled her out of an experimental expensive boarding school in Switzerland and brought her into the propulsion laboratory. It was an apocryphal story at Stark Industries, a foundations myth meant to reassure at a place that liked to call itself a meritocracy despite all the merit landing on progeny. The moment they all knew that that undefinable Stark genius had shown up again. _She had an idea,_ Howard proclaimed. 

“I always do the best job that I can,” Pepper said. 

“And for that, Virginia, we are all indebted,” Obadiah said. 

 

***

  

Pepper waited until she was home in her small kitchen leaning over the island, looking at the row of succulents on her windowsill. Her mother had started sending her succulents with a determination that boded ill for Pepper’s weekend phone calls. 

“JARVIS,” Pepper said. She was pretty sure her Stark earpiece had melded to her inner ear; she no longer bothered to take it out until ten hours in. Tony kept threatening to install JARVIS in the walls. Pepper would be more worried about it if Tony actually knew where she lived. “Do you have access to Obadiah's travel and meeting schedules?” 

“Absolutely, public or private?” 

“Both,” Pepper said, “Pull up a corr matrix with Tony's travel, like length and location, ok?”  

“Are we running a tabulation against anything in particular?” JARVIS asked in a tone of great interest. Although to be fair, he sounded like that about basic database queries too.  

“I don't know,” Pepper said. 

She thought about the model plane on the wall that she saw every day. It was a Howard Stark, an original spec model from the war. It was the only thing of Howard's in Tony's office. Obadiah never even got within five feet of it. Like it was a black hole with an event horizon, a point of no return.

“Just...just relationships,” Pepper said. “Patterns.”  

Obadiah and Tony had dinner every couple of weeks, just a little less often than he saw his aging mother. Obadiah had grown up in the south and met Howard Stark in grad school, after the war, in the middle of the post-war projects. There was a picture of them in Tony’s mansion, which was a house with very few pictures in it. Obadiah liked biscuits and gravy a little more than his doctor wanted, was loud about his dislike for glamour and surprisingly adept in front of politicians. He was one of the good ones, everyone said, a good friend, blustering and a little uncouth and real. For someone worth more than most small nation states, he was surprisingly difficult to dislike. 

He never remembered the assistants' names, Pepper had noticed. 

Pepper could do a lot of difficult things, she was learning.  

“Nothing of note at this moment,” JARVIS said smoothly, “There are multiple off-the-record travel bookings here, but of course that’s standard security measures. I might suggest a more sophisticated model than one-off linear relationships.” 

“Do whatever you like,” Pepper said. “But can you...run the analysis in background indefinitely? Let me know if something...I don't even know. Just keep track. Meetings that could be behind Tony's back, maybe. Places that seem unusual. Would it eat into your processing?” 

“How kind,” JARVIS said, sounding amused. “It won't be a problem.” 

“Can we do a Tony security level on this,” Pepper asked, feeling guilty in a diffused way about it, because she hadn’t yet met a door at Stark Industries she hadn’t had the clearance to walk through, but on the other hand, she hadn’t yet tried to keep other people _out._

“I can do you better, I can do Virginia Potts security level,” JARVIS said. Pepper blinked.

“What the hell is that,” she started, “No, don’t tell me, I don’t want to know.” 

“It will be safe,” JARVIS said, chipper and promising. 

 

***

 

 

Stark Industries was vast and complex on a level that approached sentience. It was Tony’s, but maybe Tony was its, because the Starks were less a family than a vascular system that had interwound with the entire economy, and Tony was even more of a genius than her father and twice as unstable, and had the wrong body parts besides, so the perception around her was always going to be something mystical, fraught with bias and marvel and desire, and so very rarely about who she really was.  

But Tony thought of a new a bomb and entire universities changed their undergraduate curriculum. So Stark Industries grew and conquered and dominated, and Pepper had become part of it for reasons that even she hadn’t been able to fully understand. 

And then Tony had come back with half her face a vicious set of not-healed lacerations and half a burger in her mouth and she'd just sat on the _floor_ and _thrown a wrench_ directly into the middle of the whole damn thing. And then...Tony had eaten the rest of the burger, and that was the only singular thing that Pepper had given a shit about in that moment, which was terrifying in a new, unique way. 

Stark Industries was like the Pando, old companies grafted into new ones, a conglomerate that had rolled out far beyond Howard Stark’s original vision and into an empire of uneasily bound technology fiefdoms. It was a damn sight more than _arms manufacturing_ but that had always been the brand, and now, with Tony’s proclamation that they’d no longer take military contracts nor invent new weapons products, Stark Industries started roiling over like a dive bar on a tough night. 

Pepper had no idea what she was doing in the middle of it. She had no idea _period,_ but after the first time she went missing Tony had listened to Pepper, and that had turned into almost three years of everyone else listening to Pepper, so. 

Maybe it was less a wrench and more like the new thing in Tony's chest that Pepper had barely been able to look at. 

 

***

 

The front hallway of Tony’s Malibu mansion was a wall of screens. This never failed to creep Pepper out, and after Tony’s awful, terrible, miraculous kidnapping and return they stressed her out too. They were nothing but plummeting Stark Industries graphics in repeating high-def. 

Pepper let herself in with a fingerprint. Somewhere in the background, the Imperial March started playing. 

“That’s not subtle, JARVIS,” Pepper said. It was three months after they’d gotten Tony back, and not nearly long enough. 

“Good morning Virginia. And subtlety is _so_ what defines Antonia Stark,” JARVIS chirped from the left vicinity of a potted palm. 

“I suppose we don’t choose our parents,” Pepper said. 

“A truth I repeat to myself every day. Antonia is down in the garage as usual. I’ve taken the liberty of preparing an oatmilk latte and a sandwich in the kitchen,” JARVIS said, “I've projected your blood sugar based on behavioral patterns, no actual health data breach I assure you, but I do suggest a more regular schedule.” 

Pepper rolled her eyes and tapped over the cold tiles of the foyer.  

Tony was in the garage as usual. For the past three months Tony had been in the garage nearly every day, which was _good_ as far as Tony went. 

Tony was good. That in itself was oddly difficult to handle, and it set Pepper’s teeth on edge.

Pepper had been prepared for much worse.  Three months ago that call had come in the middle of the night with its rocketlike news: _Tony was alive, she was alive, she was in the desert and Rhodey had her_. 

Pepper had felt it in the middle of her chest, joy and a ferocity that was like a fire. Once, Tony had shown Pepper a demonstration of a new liquid fuel suspended in a high temperature simulation tank at the aerospace center. When lit, it burnt like a shimmering lake of bioluminescence, blue and white and so hot that your brain couldn’t fully process it. 

That was what Pepper had felt when they found Tony: on fire, in a way that outstripped her capacity to feel.  

Pepper got three steps toward the basement. 

“Don’t come down, that’s my private space, mom,” Tony yelled, bounding up the stairs.  

“You missed our morning meeting and you said you’d there,” Pepper said. “I brought a bunch of paperwork.” 

Tony just looked happy to see her. She always looked happy when she was building. She’d been building something with an intensity that Pepper hadn’t seen in forever. Maybe ever. Tony had oil running up the back of her arms, tracing the curvature of her triceps. 

Tony pulled a gritty towel over her face and neck. 

“Stocks are down,” Pepper said, unnecessarily, because there were the graphs on the screens around them. Pepper didn’t know how Tony dealt with all the constant stimulation. Of course, probably to Tony none of it _was_ stimulation. 

“Ah, shucks,” Tony said, sing-song. 

“Some people care about the value of their company,” Pepper said, mildly. “I need you to sign these.” 

She’d brought a stack of paper outlining deals and company restructuring so complicated they made Pepper’s head spin. She hadn’t dared forge signatures on these ones. War treaties had seemed less complicated. This was open heart surgery on a multinational conglomerate patient. Tony signed with a flourish and an eyeball. 

She was wearing sweatpants. So she must have really been building. She looked like the pictures Pepper had seen of Tony burning through a couple of simultaneous graduate degrees on a fellowship that had been made up for her, wandering through engineering buildings on the east coast in a ratty tank top and trackpants with holes in the thigh. Her hair was pulled into a messy bun on the top of her head, and the ends of it curled in small, wet ringlets against the top of her neck. She still looked thin, but stronger than Pepper remembered, curves of muscle standing out clearly around her shoulders and back. 

“All right then,” Pepper said, unnecessarily. 

“Pep, I need you,” Tony said, spinning on her heel and leading them to the living room. It was news playing there, but different news. Pepper squinted at the screens: the _statue._

THE IRON MAN, right. The graphics were lodged firmly in the lefthand side of the screen. There had been multiple viral clips, multiple villages. 

“When don’t you need me. Is it the redistribution of the hardware department?” Pepper asked. Hope springs eternal. 

Tony stuffed a protein bar in her mouth, crumbs spilling on her shirt. Apparently JARVIS didn’t bother with sandwiches here. Pepper wondered, suddenly, if Tony was eating enough. The arc reactor was vaguely visible under the thin fabric of her shirt. The line of her collarbone was shiny with sweat. Pepper wondered what it would feel like, to hook a gentle fingertip on that collarbone. To hook it onto the metal ridging in Tony’s chest, to trace the scar tissue around the incision points. 

“S’not the _fucking_ hardware department,” Tony garbled, through protein bar.  

Pepper wanted, very much, to tuck the loose short piece of hair away behind her ear.  

“Then what,” Pepper said, looking down as if to check the signatures, efficient and clipped and just enough edge to make any normal person say _thanks very much for bringing over the contracts, you’re clearly very busy, you may go_. 

“Oh, that _,_ Pep, that. What do you think of that? _”_ Tony said, waving a hand at the news. 

On the tv, IRON MAN was replaced by HUNDREDS FREED and WANTON DESTRUCTION OF PROPERTY! Pepper was unclear on what sequence those things happened in. On the tv, political prisoners had been deposited on DC’s front lawn. Boats had been pulled to shore in Florida. No one knew how to react to it.  

Of course Pepper had had a plan, three months earlier when Tony had been flying back under lock and guy and armed guard. Pepper had put a tightly-guarded list of therapists on lined paper in her pocket because she hadn’t even trusted it to Stark Security systems. She’d had an exercise plan and an incredibly clever strategic shift through Stark hierarchies that would’ve reduced Tony’s workload by a good forty percent. She would’ve been great at dealing with the fallout, with Tony in shock. 

She'd been prepared for that. 

None of that was what happened. Tony had walked off the plane with her arm in a splint and a crooked look on her face and something blazing in her eyes that wasn't anything like a question.  

“I think some people are crazy,” Pepper said, at last. Tony never wanted to talk about the company, but Pepper wanted sometimes to snap her fingers in front of Tony’s face and say, _do you understand that this is a big deal? That this changes everything?_

“No doubt,” Tony smirked at her. “We can only hope. What do you think of the news?” 

“I’m waiting for an informed perspective from the UN, but one is not, so far, forthcoming,” Pepper said dryly. The Iron Man was illegal, but by what laws? _Aviation,_ Rhodey had said over sake the last time they’d had drinks, and even then he’d had a longing and envious pull in his mouth. 

“What would you do?” Tony asked. 

“What?” 

“You know, if you had the suit, if you had that kind of technology,” Tony said. 

Pepper looked back at the screens. Suit was a better name than statue, she supposed, but only nominally. It seemed a little more like a tank. But the way it _moved…_

“I would catch up with you next time to find an island to decamp to,” Pepper said. And Tony made a face at her that was half-delight, half-disgust, like Pepper hadn’t spent literal actual years chasing Tony down from one billionaire party zone to the next.  

Pepper didn’t make a face back but she arched an eyebrow, which between the two of them felt much the same. 

“Did you need something else?” Pepper said. There were four meetings being rescheduled right now. The signatures had to be in by the end of the day. If the stock prices were bad _now,_ just wait. 

“Yes,” Tony said. “I’m actually serious. If you were, you know, this iron entity,” 

“Me?” Pepper said. 

“You’re usually a lot quicker than this,” Tony said. She flung herself backwards onto the couch. She was a long body in sweatpants, dirt and oil streaking onto the cushions. She looked like her face would taste of salt and exertion and metal.  

“I'd call Rhodey,” Pepper said. 

Tony snorted a laugh. “Well, naturally,” she said through it, staring up at the ceiling. “Don’t we all wanna call Rhodey.”  

“He’d get very upset and say things about air traffic control,” Pepper said. 

“Let's say you had to make the call. Wear the suit. Let’s say we put you in a hardcase AI-enhanced jointwear body armor. You’d need a small size, Pep.” 

“I’m above average height,” Pepper said automatically, because sometimes Tony liked to push her shoulder up against Pepper and smirk down at her, like it was normal to be runway-model tall and Pepper was only compensating in her heels and fooling nobody. 

“Boot stacks to give you height, just more room for thrusters in the legs, it’s ok, I’ve already thought about the adjustments,” Tony grinned at the ceiling. “What would your strategy be? I've seen the way you schedule flights for warring board members, how is middle east instability any different?” 

Pepper wanted to roll her eyes again but didn’t. 

She couldn’t monitor Tony’s eating, or sleeping, or get her to a therapist, or even access Rhodey’s top secret files about what happened in the desert. She couldn’t stop the world, or even pause it to ask why everyone kept acting like nothing at all had happened. She couldn’t cross the space in between them, sit down on the couch, feel the rise and fall of Tony’s breath under the palms of her hands. 

She couldn’t say _I’m sorry._ Tony would never listen to something like that. 

So instead she looked at the news and felt the wheels start to go. Everything was just another form of checkers, even when people thought it was chess. 

“I guess…” she said slowly, “If I were targeting Ten Rings, I wouldn’t think about it like the military thinks about it. Not our military. The statue--the _suit,_ the suit is powerful, but it’s still only one thing. One point of action, one push at a time.”  

“Right,” Tony said, and Pepper risked a glance at her. She didn’t see anything drawn out on her face even though it must be _something,_ to see the desert on this screen, and why would Tony want to have it pulled up all around her? The air felt uneasy, a world smaller than normal with the yellow landscapes rippling out on the white glass, smart screen walls of the mansion. 

“What else?” Tony prompted. 

Pepper gave her a look, one of about three that all said _I can tell when you’re trying to get me to confirm what you already think,_ because Tony was always going to be smarter than Pepper. Smarter than _everyone._ But it was also a thrill to be the person who got to do that. Even if it was only propinquity. 

“Maybe it’s about the perception. First the region, then the world. Free enough of the people that they start pushing back against the terrorists. And the terrorists only have that power because they have the technology, right?”

“Terrorists,” Tony said, bland, almost too bland, like _these specific terrorists_ hadn’t shot a hole through her sternum, and maybe _that was why the screens were all desert,_ and Pepper wanted, so much, to cross the room and wrap her arms around Tony’s tall, lanky, strong, thin frame and not let a thing in between them, not even the air--but that was ludicrous, and she didn’t. 

“Terrorists always run on perception,” Pepper said.  

“Although their access to the entire Stark inventory can’t have been a hindrance,” Tony said. 

Right. And there it was, the way that Tony always did it, casually-dropped heartbreak big enough to shatter legacies. 

“All right,” Pepper said, “But it’s how these systems _work._ It’s how we believe they’re too powerful or it’s too dreadful or impossible to change things. If you convince people that they’re not infallible, you convince people there could be something else.” 

“So how do we do that?” Tony asked. 

“There's got to be a trigger point along the supply that will have a cascading effect on all the others,” Pepper said. “You can halt production at the source,” and Stark Industries has halted production all right, “But that takes a long time. There’s already a free-flowing market for the weaponry that’s in distribution, so they’ll just be running off that. But they don’t have access to the mineral deposits or the manufacturing, do they. And really, the black market always depends on relationships. Fastest way to end it would be to find the biggest nodes in the chain of distribution _._ Disrupt a few, and the others will start to distrust each other. Alliances will break down, people will fight back. It should happen in a sequence, so they start to see it like a pattern. So the normal people there, who know the chain, they see that it’s not invincible. They see the weak points.”

“Like dominoes,” Tony said. And Pepper nodded. 

“Change the perception, and their network falls apart. With a suit like that? You don’t need an army. One person could do that.” 

“With the right technology, in the right hands,” Tony said. 

Pepper looked at her. Howard Stark had said that. It had been in one of the early post-war videos that they still had on file. It had been the beginning of Stark Industries’ military contracts. 

Pepper felt, somewhere as deep as any feeling ever went, that Tony had come back different. That the Tony who had come back was putting on as much of an act as the Tony who had left, but in reverse. That she had spent three years learning every in and out of somebody, only to be left here in high heels clutching contracts she didn’t fully understand, looking at Tony and not _knowing._

And then Pepper blinked, and it was gone. 

“Stay for lunch,” Tony said. “JARVIS made sandwiches. I’ll drone the paperwork back to the office. Let’s play some video games.” 

“It’s three o’clock,” Pepper said.  

“You shouldn’t skip lunch,” Tony said, chastising. “Have you ever even played a video game?” 

“They give me headaches. This person is a lunatic, this person with the suit,” Pepper pointed out, “JARVIS, I need you to up Tony’s security.” 

“Might I remind you that we tripled it just last week,” JARVIS said gently, robot voice singing out from the corner of the room.  

“Who’s the boss?” Pepper said. And thankfully for the sake of his internal circuitry, JARVIS did not answer. 

Tony made a hideous raspberry noise.

“I’m serious,” Pepper said, “This Iron….this lunatic has got to be at least tangentially aware of Stark Industries. Tony, it’s not ok that there’s a lunatic out there with the same people who took you. None of this is normal.”  

“You’re always serious, it’s your greatest character flaw,” Tony said, looking back at the ceiling.  

Pepper sighed. 

“We should auction off a painting. And donate the proceeds to the cleanup missions on this. It'll help the stock. It'll help your image. I’m leaving now, Tony, if there’s nothing else.” 

“Riddle me this,” Tony said, sinking deeper into the couch with her head hanging off the arm, “Why is my image so much worse now that I'm for _peace?”_

Pepper didn't have an answer. Tony just smiled like she'd expected as much.

“They like me better when they can call me the _bombshell,”_ Tony said softly. “That's an acceptable kind of smart girl to be, I expect. They don't know what I am if I’m not dreaming weapons. The hippie halfwits can't go back on decades of hating the Starks, and the best play for the generals is _well she's only a little girl.”_

“Stop,” Pepper said, because it wasn't true and she couldn't stand it. “You're not what these people--” 

“Pity is fucked, Pep, and it's sure as hell a waste of time on me,” Tony said sharply, and she gestured back at the screen. They’d moved on to the reel of the latest IRON MAN ACTION! It was a tiny village. It was so obscure they had to blow out into an explanatory graphic on the side, with an arrow pointing to an unfamiliar map. There was a rotating shot of screaming faces they kept playing. Real people, presumably, but only real to the rest of the world for their newfound virality. 

“We haven't got time to spare. There never has been. Don’t worry about me _,_ Pep.” 

Pepper swallowed hard, and nodded. Tony didn’t look at her, and the silence hung heavy for several beats. Pepper didn’t always feel like Tony was her boss _,_ but sometimes it descended like a wall between them.

“I've got three prospective houses for the auction. I suggest the minor Vermeer.” 

“The one in dear old dad's  office,” Tony said, and the twisted contempt in her voice nearly made Pepper wince. _Decades of hating the Starks,_ and nobody was better at it than Starks. 

“You never look at that one when we're there, I thought you wouldn't miss it,” Pepper said. 

On the screen, the metal vigilante landed in a dust storm. Tony had gone back to watching it. She hadn’t moved on the couch but her face was sharp as a blade, the way she watched flight tests and chemistry experiments. 

“If that's all,” Pepper said. 

“Cheers,” Tony said, raising a glass. Pepper hadn't even realized she had it, but it was a glass full of indeterminate green stuff, not alcohol. She hadn't seen Tony drink since the rescue, come to think of it. 

“You don't just dream up weapons,” Pepper said. Tony didn’t say anything. She was turned away from Pepper, facing the endless reel of action on the screens, unreachable. Pepper could see the outline of a strange bruise on the back of her neck, blue and thick and deep.  

Pepper thought Tony wasn’t going to say anything in response, but then she did. 

“Then what the fuck else are all these things in my head?” Tony asked softly. “I _think in weapons,_ Pepper. It's all I've ever done.” 

“You think about tools,” Pepper said. “They’re machines. Things that--it’s just things that work. You make...you make fire. Sometimes fire is a weapon but it's more than that. People need fire. It’s not just guns that have triggers, Tony. It’s engines. It’s change. Something needs to lit it up, doesn’t have to be weapons. You think in _change._ ”  

She could just see the crook of Tony’s cheek, an upward tilt to her mouth. And for that she got the glass raised in her direction again. 

“To finding trigger points.” 

 

 

***

 

Eight months into her new job and shortly after the third time Tony went missing (a day trip up the coast to a Danish bakery in Santa Barbara because Tony had decided _I want that particular kind of scone_ meant more than a ten-hour tour of a new flight model), Pepper realized that she’d reached a kind of equilibrium at Stark Industries when she managed to go an entire weekend without an email from a board member misspelling her name, or a head engineer saying vaguely threatening things in the middle of the third floor hallway when he failed to see Pepper’s badge.

The last time _that_ happened, Tony had been twenty feet away at a lab table and wielding a fine glass device for probing bio-electronics, and Pepper had been trailing her, trying to fix something JARVIS had pointed out about inefficiencies in shipping routes. 

“Now you aren’t allowed back here,” the head engineer was saying, but his eyes were saying something else. 

“I have clear—” Pepper was starting, but the engineer had already started speaking over it.  

“This isn’t a playground,” he said, and the way he squinted at her made her shift in place, like she’d accidentally chosen the wrong dress that morning, like her voice was too soft and breakable.

Eight months wasn’t nearly long enough to feel at home in a place like Stark Industries, a place where her boss had lunches with Nobel Prize winners and afternoons with World Cup winners, and most people treated Pepper with a thinly-veiled contempt, like Tony Stark’s assistants were just a slightly less dangerous place to put all their conflicting feelings about _Tony Stark._

“Oh, why? Is she in danger of overloading the production relays and causing a critical short-out in quality control?” Tony said. She could cross a lot of distance very fast when she wanted to, and she still had the long glass probe in her hand.  

The engineer winced. 

“My bad,” Tony said thoughtfully, “That was _you. And_ apparently you don’t know Ms. Potts, allow me to introduce you. This is a name you should remember. Your lucky day.” 

She flicked Pepper’s badge with an easy reach, pulling it out on the retractable cord from where it was hooked onto Pepper’s belt. The engineer looked at Tony with an uneasy smile. 

Tony tapped the plastic badge. Pepper’s tiny pixelated face was bleary behind a plastic cover. Tony held it up, very, very close to the engineer’s face. 

“Ms. Potts. I’d remember it,” Tony said. 

She smiled, and handed Pepper the glass needle, and wandered off to shove gloved arms into an intimidating transparent box labeled CAUTION on all four sides. The engineer grimaced in a polite, apologetic way and faded away.  

Pepper stood, pad in one hand and glass in the other and electronics all around, and used one index finger to merge three shipping lines and solve the problem by expediting the approvals on a fleet of updated, autonomous-aid, carbon offset trucks.  

Maybe eight months was, in fact, just long enough. 

 

***

 

The first sighting of the strange vigilante was like the first wave signaling a storm out at sea. 

By six months into the Stark Industries re-org, THE IRON MAN was everywhere. Perversely, his name scrolled in all caps in Pepper's head, all the time, like that graphic had graffitied itself all over her subconscious. Pepper prided herself on keeping a neat subconscious, so this was annoying. 

But everyone was talking about it: Ten Rings falling, one village at a time until it was less villages than it was cities, and the men and women on those cities getting sympathetic faces on the nightly news and the daily internet boards. 

Tony didn’t seem to pay anymore attention to it, but she made a face of terribly satisfaction on a video call, when Pepper rang her to share the interview from a Stark board member where he’d waxed philosophical about transforming a post-world war two industrial structure. 

“New world, he called it,” Pepper said. 

“New world as long as it’s the same old dudes with the money,” Tony had said, but she’d still looked…if not _happy,_ at least determined. 

“It’s still working, your pivot is happening,” Pepper said firmly, despite the fact that she’d actually called to complain for a long time that the company was _impossible_ and _needed Tony to come run it for fuck’s sake,_ but the way Tony’s eyes flickered back to her across the screen was stupidly good, like a deep night’s sleep and a slow waking. Her eyes were brown and ringed with darker pigment. Pepper had them memorized.  

“You really think so?” Tony asked, and Pepper thought _fuck, god, fuck_ and said “You know I only tell you facts.” 

Tony was gone much of the time and sometimes present on Pepper’s phone via a series of increasingly annoying texts; Pepper didn’t really understand how Stark Industries could have elaborate virtual reality conference videos in every office but Tony could apparently spend an entire week communicating only in emojis. 

But things were moving, feeling exciting, even, when Pepper didn’t feel sick with worry or apathetic with exhaustion. She had started going to lunch with the floral-patterned cluster that made up the third-level administrative staff. Third-level administration staff was where it was _at,_ Pepper had discovered. Third-level administration staff were primarily mothers of three in their forties and fifties. Third-level administration staff knew Stark Industries better than anyone, from the backdoors and the inside-out and the old, dusty parking lot where they carpooled in minivans and knew everyone’s commute routes and Starbucks orders. Third-level administration staff could pilot the company through the eye of a hurricane, and Pepper loved them.  

It was Nadine (Mechanical Engineering administration, blue Mazda MVP, _Mocha Frappuccino_ ) who had suggested the repair initiative. Stark Industries had leapt into foreign aid infrastructure repair in the wake of the Iron Man weeks before any other company. It gave the engineers a drive and even maintained some of their military contracts, albeit pushing a severely skeptical Rhodey into negotiations with the higher ups for special committees on revising strategies.  

“Isn't it your goal to _win the hearts,”_ Pepper said one midnight in the downstairs VIP lounge of the Malibu office. “Aren’t you just super happy that our pulling all the guns has ‘stabilized the region?’” 

“The Air Force doesn't have a heart, that would be a tactical weakness,” Rhodey said into a bowl of ramen. “I’m extremely unhappy that the biggest playmakers in a delicate international situation appear to be a weapons manufacturer that suddenly _has_ a heart, and a tin man. It’s a little wizard of oz for me, personally.”  

They'd been waiting for Tony for two hours when JARVIS had the ramen delivered. They were sunk into facing corners of the plush red couch, napkins spread carelessly on the cushions.

“Does that make you the lion?” Pepper said.  

“What does it make you?”

“Maybe the scarecrow,” Pepper said, thinking of Tony at college at twelve. Sometimes it _felt_ like her head must be hollow compared to all of that. It hurt in an undefinable way. Pepper stabbed at a noodle and it slipped away. 

“Absolute bullshit,” Rhodey pronounced. “You’re the functional one. I’m afraid you’re Dorothy.” 

Pepper pushed over a basket of sweet crunchy pastry corners. 

“Score,” Rhodey said. At heart he was someone happiest on the floor with his mouth full, and Pepper felt safe around that in a way she rarely felt with people. She put a napkin on his knee, patting it. 

“We’re not shipping out the last of the Jerichos,” Pepper said, hand still on Rhodey’s knee. 

“It’ll be hell to pay,” Rhodey said. “Did you tell Obadiah?” 

Pepper frowned and took another stab at the noodles. “He’s in board meetings all week,” she said. 

Rhodey looked at her over a crunchy pastry with expressive eyebrows.  

“Rhodey,” Pepper said, “Obadiah’s been in board meetings all week…hasn’t he?” 

“You know your people,” Rhodey said, and politely didn’t comment at the way that Pepper snorted a noodle nearly into choking, because Pepper knew _Tony,_ not Obadiah, of that she was sure. “But I know my people, and Obadiah’s favorite pilot team were all called out on special ops this week.” 

Pepper looked up at the ceiling. JARVIS was invisible. Sometimes Pepper daydreamed about asking Tony to give her something tangible, because JARVIS had kind of turned into Pepper’s work wife: she wanted a line of lights to show JARVIS moving across the ceiling, maybe a flickering pulse to show that he’d heard Rhodey too. 

“But it's changing,” Pepper said, nodding at the screen. They were watching the latest clip over noodles, both loopy levels of exhausted. “I mean, this is actually. Something.” 

“This dude is changing things,” Rhodey said, in a tone of awe. “Well, and Tony too, fucking up Stark Industries. Is it gonna work? I don’t know.” 

“I don't know,” Pepper echoed honestly, because some days she couldn't see past the four foot stack of federal paperwork screaming bloody murder on her desk, and some days she looked at the screens and they said things like _billions injected in an overseas aid arms race,_ and it all felt unreal, like a great big coup, like a tilt to the machinations of the same old badness. 

The world didn't even have a vocabulary for whatever this was, whatever started when Tony came back. 

“Does Tony even know she's standing up a meeting I've been trying to schedule for two months?” Pepper asked. 

Rhodey made a snort around his extra egg. Even JARVIS knew he needed extra egg.  

“Fair, fair,” Pepper said. 

“It's different though, this one,” Rhodey said with his mouth full even though she hasn't asked, watching the statue on the screen and the tech neither of them understood. “This really is something different. Different is messy.” 

But he only sounded excited. Pepper felt a shiver up her spine. Maybe it was good. Maybe it was bad. If the world had changed because Tony had changed, well. Unpredictability was the defining feature.

But Pepper was nothing if not practical. “At least it won't have anything to do with us,” she said decisively, “We'll just be the cogs out here at night doing the work.” 

Rhodey raised a cloudy bottle of unfiltered sake in a solemn gesture and Pepper returned it, solidarity of righthands. 

 

 

***

 

The thirty-seventh time Tony was lost and then found, Pepper had waited on the runway in a dress. Which she resolutely knew was stupid, but after that first time she always wore a dress when they brought Tony back; assistant, underlevel designer, classy but reprimanding at the same time. It was a trivial joke never spoken out loud, Pepper's perfect lipstick and Tony's ratnest hair and their ritualistic walk back to the car. It gave the tabloids endless comparison fodder and Pepper hated that but Tony rather _loved it,_ had gotten a Daily Mail framed in the bathroom the first time they'd run Pepper's wide-eyed, startled-looking face on the cover with _THE STARK-SITTER_ underneath. 

Tony had a limp. It wasn’t the thing that Pepper had expected to focus on but it was better than looking at _the sinkhole in her fucking chest_ so she looked at the limp instead. It made Tony slouch, at Pepper’s height for once or even below it. 

“Hospital. I’ve preselected General, and the streets are shut down on the way to it,” Pepper said, already typing a message to reserve the entire orthopedics department. 

Tony looked like her face was too swollen to smile. She’d left her sunglasses on. She curled her fingers around the edge of Pepper’s pad and got in the way of the note. 

“We’re doing a press roundup, I have something to say,” she said, voice like gravel. Of _course._

“We are not,” Pepper said calmly. Tony hadn’t said anything but she’d stopped there, a moment on the runway in the hot sun. It couldn’t have been hotter than the desert, Pepper thought dumbly, Tony either looking or not looking at her through sunglasses. 

“We are,” Tony said. She looked like she’d be smiling if she could be. They’d cleaned her up at the military base, and on the plane, Pepper was sure. But the skin on the top of her ears was swollen and the sheen at the base of her neck wasn’t just from normal exertion. 

“If you’re good I’ll record a video and we’ll put it online,” Pepper said. The ground was too warm under her feet. The baked tar radiated through her thin soles. 

“Pep,” Tony said, throat raw, the lacerations on her face not even close to healed. “I have to.”  

“You have a ninety, a ninety-five percent chance of, I don’t even know, you’re gonna get an _infection_ ,” Pepper was terribly aware of the fact that Tony was nearly leaning into her. That she looked thinner, despite all the army layers, despite the radiating presence that nothing could ever take away from Tony Stark. Pepper was aware of the sun on the back of her neck, the faint coolness where the wind hit the drying tear tracks on her cheek, the stupid and unfathomable fact that they’d _gotten Tony back_ and not because she was a genius nor because she was protected by her own value--fucking _value_ hadn’t stopped them blowing a hole in her chest--but because of Tony’s own strength of will. 

“An infection would’ve taken me out by now, already,” Tony said. 

“They shot you,” Pepper said, clutching the pad because she couldn’t clutch Tony’s fingers and squeeze her into being anything that would satisfy. 

“That was a long time ago, and I’m pretty sure I fixed it,” Tony said, and now she _was_ grinning, and it did look like it hurt. “Things to do, Pep! People to see! Boards to dismay! International war machines to eviscerate!” 

“What,” Pepper said, better than pushing Tony whole-body into the towncar and strapping her down with a seatbelt and making them drive to a cabin at Tahoe until the entire world settled down and stopped buzzing in her ears, “What are you _talking about_ ,” 

“I’ve assembled ten major media outlets in the Malibu office lobby,” JARVIS said through their in-ears. 

“Rad,” Tony said, “Time to make the Stark graves flip in perpetual motion for the rest of time. Hey, two new sources of clean energy in a month. I’m a genius, Pepper!” 

“JARVIS, I’m assigning you citywide hospital administration, I’d like you to transform them to digital standards,” Pepper said, cool as ice. JARVIS made a very frightened beeping noise.

“You look terrible,” Tony said, per their tradition, climbing into the car. She looked like she was still trying to smirk through the swelling in her face, like it was reassuring to show Pepper that she could, that everything was back to normal, that it was like nothing had happened at all.  

And later, this would be another moment, frozen in time, that Pepper would never forget. Tony Stark, beaten all to hell, and still always, forever, performing. 

The army jacket had slipped just enough to show the edged ridge of the unfamiliar shape embedded in the slope down from Tony's collarbone. Pepper had only been granted lowest level access to a cursory report from Rhodey, everything military classified and infuriatingly locked down. But there was no hiding _that_. It was crude, nothing like the fine polished end products from their commercial labs. It was uneven rough textures and spindling threads of wire that looked like they’d been wrestled together in the dark, slippery with blood. And later, Pepper would find out that they had been. The sun glinted off the pavement enough to make the air shimmer, but even through the brightness, the thing in Tony’s chest seemed to glow past the daylight. 

Only Tony Stark could solder scrap metal and trauma into a star. 

“You look great,” Pepper said, not crying at all. 

 

***

  

Eleven months after Tony’s rescue, Stark Industries was like a new parent pretending it had its shit together enough to get out of the house wearing something that wasn’t covered in vomit. 

“Remind me why we are throwing the annual charity gala while there are four active crises on my desk since yesterday at midnight?” Pepper asked, running on determination and a mid-afternoon iced soy macchiato. She was going through the side lobby in a desperate bid to not get waylaid by Ammunitions R&D and composing an email to the third-level administration staff with her left thumb. 

“It’s a celebratory statement about the company’s new direction,” JARVIS said promptly. “A quick text summary of your last twenty communications on the gala show stopword phrases like _a flag in the ground, distract the board, pictures of Tony looking happy and shiny,_ and _stick it to the press in some way, for some second, for fuck’s sake.”_  

“Oh, I remember,” Pepper said. “I assume this gala is a bold political statement and a chess move of extremely canny strategic proportions, which I merely can’t imagine right now because my brain is soup and I can hear a crunching noise coming from nowhere.”  

“This wing is being renovated,” JARVIS said, and Pepper smiled into her drink and noted that Barbara (third-level administration for Quality Control, green minivan from the 2000s, strawberry black tea _no sugar_ ) had already suggested tasking Ammunitions with the decommissioning of bulk weapons recall, which was truly genius and would divert disaster for yet another quarter. And she’d sent five new cat gifs.  

“It’s going to work, stocks are going to turn around,” Pepper said, because Stark Industries didn’t have its shit together in the slightest and every surface was absolutely covered in vomit, but goddammit, this place had slicked its stupidly overengineered tendrils all the way through her and she didn’t even think she minded anymore. 

“You have always had a keen instinct for the storytelling. I took the liberty of booking the penthouse suite in the downtown hotel for you already. It will be a thirty second elevator ride from the ballroom where the gala will be held.”  

“You’re too good to me.” 

“Not possible, Virginia,” JARVIS said, and faux-hung up with an unnecessary auditory _click_ in her earpiece before Pepper could assign him something terrible. 

IRON MAN, flashed the graphic on the screens lining the hallway up to the decommissioned labs. There were two extremely chipper blondes running morning news show turnover coverage and asking the truly critical questions. 

_“Is he as streamlined underneath all that armor?”_

_“I’d date a robot if he was that good with kids.”_  

Tony was hanging out of some kind of frontend of a fighter jet, fiddling with an exhaust port. 

“We had lunch on the calendar,” Pepper said.

“Let me guess, at that thai place you can’t get enough of. You know thai places are a scheme to get more American tourists,” Tony said, grunting into the port.  

“Isn’t that most food? It is now four pm,” Pepper said dryly, “And that thai takeout is _good.”_

“Hm, come to Paris with me sometime and we’ll eat a lot of bread and wash it down with three times as much wine,” Tony said, a surprisingly picky eater for someone who grew up with an in-home chef. 

There was a hanging light that bounced off her cheekbone at this angle, and it hit the fine hairs underneath her ear, damp with sweat from the effort of wrenching whatever she’d been wrenching. Pepper shifted in her heels, ill at ease like she sometimes got when Tony was like this, splayed out across an engine, ignoring the rest of the world, lobbing fond fantasies over her shoulder. Pepper could imagine her in Paris, could imagine losing her down a side street, could imagine Tony re-emerging with something preposterous like a flapping fish from the Seine, could imagine Tony pushing her bodily into a dark museum room to see some sculpture no one else had ever cared about, could imagine Tony dropping tall and loose and languid onto a couch in some sixth floor walkup hotel, pulling a ratty band tshirt over her head as carelessly as discarding a gum wrapper.

Pepper swallowed.

“I can’t go to Paris,” Pepper said, “I’m throwing the largest gala the west coast has ever seen. I need to make sure you’ll be at the gala, it’s not optional.”

“Do you think we could make these very small indeed, like small enough for a bodysuit instead of a plane?” Tony asked. She was wearing a tshirt that had a hole in the armpit. 

“I don’t know. But you have to come tonight. I’ve spent a small fortune orchestrating this and the entire board will be there, plus enough media to cover a civil war.”  

“Just in case that happens, I suppose,” Tony said. 

“This actually matters to me,” Pepper said. “This actually matters to the company. To making your whole...I don’t know what. Your _pivot,_ the strategy, it matters to do this thing tonight.” 

Tony looked at her, and back at the plane with longing. Pepper couldn’t read whatever was in her face.  

“Fine,” she said. 

“Really, is that it?” Pepper said, disbelieving. “Are you going to show up in a bikini with the entire cast of _The L Word_ or something?” 

“No, I’ll really be there,” Tony said, grinning. “I’ll even wear a suit for it.”  

“I already had one drycleaned, it’ll be on your bed,” Pepper said, a little off-footed by how easily Tony had agreed, and without even some dubiously immoral emotional blackmail. 

“Ok,” Tony said, agreeably. 

“Ok,” Pepper repeated. 

“Ok,” Tony said, and she twirled a wrench between her fingers. It was dumb how graceful that looked and how striking it was. Pepper stared at it for a second before she pulled away. She felt her cheeks flush without being able to explain why. Tony was still grinning. 

“And I’m taking the rest of the day off,” Pepper said.  

Tony clapped her hands. “Amazing,” she said, “Finally. I needed another set of hands, Pep. Come hold this traction for me.” 

Pepper frowned at her. “I’m going back _to my apartment.”_

“What, your apartment, why?” Tony said, blinking quickly like she was only just coming into object permanence about Pepper, to the heady realization that Pepper could possibly exist somewhere that wasn’t between the pressed-gilt-silk walls of Tony’s stupid houses and around the corner, waiting on a button press.

“I’m going home,” Pepper said, and walked away.

Tony jumped down from the workstation and followed.  

“How come I’ve never seen it?” Tony demanded, following too close, like she always did. “How come I don't even know where it is, unacceptable. Why don't I have a key?”  

“Do you remember when the company made you take sensitivity training? I'm sure they covered the part where you don't get the key to your employees’ two bedroom apartments off the park,” Pepper said. 

“Off the park?” Tony said, “Why don't you live closer? We should find you a place, hey JARVIS,” 

“I believe Virginia is content,” JARVIS said. Pepper smiled at the ceiling and kept walking. 

“I don’t need to live closer,” said Pepper, who had dropped a bowl of almond milk and oatmeal the first time she’d received a Stark paycheck, who had polished three pairs of shoes into compulsive, unnoticeable sleekness for all of business school, who had bought an apartment on the strength of a living room full of windows, one and a half years into the job, once she’d started believing in the paychecks. 

“What if I need you?” Tony demanded. And it was so fucking terrible and yet representative of everything that made Pepper despair about herself, that she stopped for long enough that Tony to stop too. 

“Show _up_ tonight,” Pepper said, “Don’t cause chaos for once.”  

It was a good opportunity for a very terrible joke. But Tony only said, “Ok.” 

 

***

 

Pepper was walking out of her office (formerly Tony’s, but at some point in the past ten months even the plate outside the door had been changed. Pepper didn’t know whether this was JARVIS’ fault or Tony’s, or whether that was ultimately the same in the end) when the ring on the shelf caught the light of the embedded ceiling bulbs and sparkled in the corner of her eye. 

Pepper walked over and considered it. It sat where it always sat, a friendly small chunk of stupidly expensive, stupidly rare material. Pepper picked it up off the shelf. The ring was surprisingly heavy, like dense objects were, but it sat in her hand in a way that reassured. The ring was Tony coming back, and making joke, and sharing it with Pepper. 

Pepper shook her head at herself, but she slipped the ring onto her finger, and went home to take a very long nap, and then a very long shower, and get ready for the night.

 

***

 

The cadence of the job was always strange. Pepper couldn’t remember the last time she’d gone grocery shopping. JARVIS had the market deliver a standing order every Sunday, and that worked despite the fact that sometimes she opened her refrigerator and found things like kale. There were mornings when she was so busy that she’d wake up to an entire bathroom mirror covered in urgent reminder post-its.

But sometimes everything stilled. Those moments were like gemstones, buffed out of rock: surprising and impenetrably beautiful. 

The gala was already a success. The social media streams were glorious, the press buzz was excellent, the major engineering staff had gotten eighty-five percent of the way toward settled in their new roles, which was as much contentment as Pepper _ever_ hoped for out of engineering. Stark Industries shone as the new Stark Industries, reborn even if none of them really knew what that meant other than what they were running from. But it was out in the open, standing proud, looking like something that could keep standing. 

Pepper found herself without a thing left to do. She leaned back against the bar and just watched _._ They’d rented out the oldest hotel in the city, which wasn’t the biggest nor the goldest but it was the loveliest, Pepper thought with satisfaction. There were five fountains cleverly sunk into the middle of a dance floor that shone with tiny, crystalline lights embedded in columns. There was an elegant bio-kinetic sculpture doing double duty as a champagne dispenser and a reminder to the high and mighty guests of all the work that the company could do that _wasn’t_ blowing bits into smaller bits. There was a walkway out to the dancefloor that played a tasteful reel from the medical projects, and even a running donation counter for affordable housing, an unpopular measure which Pepper had determined Stark Industries could _make_ popular. It was new, marshaling a corporation this way, and giving people a good time at that, still the glamour and still the tech, but _doing something._  

For once Pepper didn’t see Tony first. She was in the shadows, out of the light, looking across the room in a black suit. Tony was actually inconspicuous.  

Tony smiled like she’d been waiting, all this time, for Pepper to turn around. Pepper’s stomach dropped, and she thought _I should turn away now._

“Are you gonna throw me out because I didn’t wear the tie,” Tony said, at Pepper’s shoulder instead of across the room where she belonged with all the celebrities and the VIPs and the politicians. Pepper hadn’t turned away, Pepper found that she couldn’t. 

“I’m considering it, I picked that tie out specifically,” Pepper said. Tony looked like a study in contrasts. Before Pepper, someone had always styled Tony in designer gowns for these galas. It had never looked right, but this was right. The dark, sharp lines echoed the cut of her dark brows and lashes over her unusual face with its strong features. 

“Well not that you haven't the right, but please don’t. Then I’d miss you all dressed up,” Tony said, and Pepper wrinkled her nose reflexively. 

“I’m always dressed up,” she said, because it was true even if it was a uniform, and this was definitely not a uniform. 

“I’m serious,” Tony said, “It’s a one in a million experience.”  

Pepper looked back at the gala with a disturbing amount of satisfaction. Maybe Stark Industries wasn't the only new parent. 

“Isn’t it? I think I saw three board members actually cracking smiles over by the punch bowl. That could be because JARVIS drugged them. But you should see the articles that are already on pre-release,” Pepper said. 

“I meant you in this dress,” Tony said, too earnestly. Pepper felt the back of her neck flush red, but nobody could tell under these lights. 

“Stop it,” she said. 

“I appreciated that it was a bowtie,” Tony said. She’d unbuttoned her crisp white shirt, just a few buttons, enough to show the preternaturally sharp edge of the new chest piece that she’d made without telling anyone. Anyone except Pepper. 

“Tonight was about showing off, not hiding,” Pepper said. 

“Maybe not anymore,” Tony said. Pepper didn’t know why she was still here, why she was still looking at Pepper’s face. She could feel the edge of Tony’s hand, close in space but not quite touching her forearm. Tony wasn’t usually subtle, wasn’t usually restrained, but something about her seemed fuzzy on the edges. Probably it was fatigue. Pepper needed a week of sleep.

“Care to dance, Ms. Potts?” 

Pepper blinked. “We can’t.” 

Tony laughed. “Not a phrase I’ve heard from you very often.”

Pepper licked her bottom lip, before she remembered she was wearing lipstick. “We shouldn’t. All these people.” 

Tony hummed. Her mouth was a gentle sideways smile. “Do you not want to?”  

Pepper looked at her blankly. “Why would that matter?” 

“Did you say you got to see pre-releases from the press? Do they do that for any other corporation?” 

“I’ve got contacts in every newsroom, and we’ve got a calculated ceasefire as long as I make JARVIS occasionally help them run long investigative journalism with complicated databases,” Pepper was protesting automatically, before she realized she’d been guided out onto the floor, stepping backwards without even thinking, Tony’s arm at her back.

“Of course you took dance lessons,” Pepper said. 

“Tuesday mornings at ten,” Tony said. 

“I thought tuesdays were for making grenades.” 

“That wasn't until eleven.”  

Tony led well, warm contact and steady steps. They were in the middle of the floor, and Pepper tried not to look at anybody else, but nothing had exploded and nobody had laughed. It was, instead, rather exceptionally lovely. The lighting from the columns came from everywhere and nowhere, outlining everyone in a thin radiance. 

“I can’t dance,” Pepper said. 

“You’re doing an admirable job,” Tony said. 

Pepper had spent three years knowing the details of Tony’s hands, but she didn’t think she’d ever felt them. Tony had wide hands, with bony knuckles. Pepper’s hand looked white against Tony’s darker skin, and her fingertips felt cold. She pressed them into the warm pressure of Tony’s lead, and Tony pressed back. It was like a hug, but delicate. 

“At all of it,” Tony added. She was still smiling. 

Pepper smiled back. It was stupid, and they shouldn’t have been out there, and there they were anyway. Tony stepped forward, and Pepper stepped back, and found herself turned neatly in a circle. Pepper couldn’t remember the last time she’d danced. 

“You don’t do a bad job yourself,” Pepper said. This was a stupid thing to say to a genius, she knew, and did anyway. 

“Oh, but I do,” Tony said, “I really do.”  

“Tony,” Pepper said. 

“Pep,” Tony said. The press of her hand was warm and light at the same time, like she was afraid to be too much, like Pepper was the one in charge. “I do the worst job. But hey, I do it with _style.”_

“The gala is working,” Pepper said, and Tony just smiled more at her. 

“I’m glad, you deserve that,” she said. Pepper felt it suddenly like a strange inversion--the shimmering, sapphire silk of her gown and her hair heavy on her shoulders, like she was the center of the company, Tony staring at _her._  

“I think you do a good job,” Pepper said. “I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t think that.” 

Tony had a quiet that came over her when she was thinking, when she really cared. Not many people noticed it, but Pepper had noticed two and a half years ago and then never stopped noticing. It was the only child in her, the orphan jumping grades past anyone her own age. 

“Pep,” Tony started, but they’d moved to the edge of the ballroom, and there was a woman on the sidelines pressing in, close with a dogged expression on her face.  

“Tony,” the woman said.  

“Be a doll and wait,” Tony drawled, almost robotic. And the quiet was gone, in its place something jagged. 

“It’s ok,” Pepper said, even though she didn’t know if it was, and she felt her left hand clutching on Tony’s shoulder, slipping on the high quality fabric of her dark jacket. They shouldn’t have done this. The woman’s eyes were huge and ringed with thick mascara in a symmetrical, LA face. 

Pepper wondered for a quick, sick second whether this was a hookup come back to stalk Tony. It had happened. The woman moved closer. There were people all around, and even Tony couldn’t walk them out of the way. She was uncomfortably close.  

“Tony Stark,” the woman said. 

“Don’t recall signing a dance card,” Tony said.  

Pepper could see the woman’s face. She was only looking at Tony, like Pepper was nothing but a prop in the way. Not a hookup. 

“Getting a little eager with the pre-releases for the press?” Tony said, biting, and Pepper suddenly recognized the woman. Christine Everhart. Of course Tony knew her, had the memory of her pressed for retrieval in her quick brain. She was that reporter who had done that profile, right before Tony’s capture, the one with the blistering focus on the arms trade. Before Tony had been captured, _that_ had seemed like a big deal. 

“Is this what you call _change?”_ Christine said, holding up a picture. Boxes and boxes of missiles, and the Jericho in all its pieces. It was an encampment in the desert, dated from this morning. Pepper couldn’t do the timezone in her head, her mind tripping over the numbers. It could’ve been just an hour earlier. 

And every single box was stamped with the same logo floating around the room. Stark Industries. 

 

***

 

The seventh time Tony went missing, it was at a three day long Stark Industries convention in Vegas. Pepper had been working at Stark Industries for thirteen months. Pepper had a frequent flyer status that she’d not previously known existed, and seven different international manufacturing managers in her personal cell phone address book, and a growing uncomfortable certainty that all the competence in the world hadn't yet earned Tony's trust, and that she didn’t know if it ever could. 

“Find her,” Obadiah had snapped, not at Pepper but in the general direction of the small army of staff who represented Stark Industries R&D. It still sent a flinch down Pepper’s spine. Even his voice changed when he was angry. He dropped the folksy accent and the long vowels. 

Pepper tucked that instinctual flinch away, to remember. Because after all, it was worth paying attention to men like that. Even the ones who got philanthropic awards, even the ones who had wings named after them at children’s hospitals.  

On the first day of the convention, Tony had emptied out an entire poker table and gotten into a fistfight; on the second day, Tony had charmed a posse of millionaires into a doubled investment in Stark Industries. 

But tonight, in the middle of the final grand gala dinner and thirty minutes before Tony had to give a groundbreaking demonstration to the assembled forces of the Annual Stark Expo, Pepper found her in the back corner of the hotel pool, curled on a lounge chair with three towels. 

“Tony,” Pepper said, voice level and calm. Like it was every single day that she walked up to her boss and watched her flinch away from the sound of a human voice, watched her eyes reflect the pool, fathomless and at the same time, not really there. 

“Hi, Pepper,” Tony said. There was mascara on her cheek, and her skin was pale. 

Pepper sat on the edge of the lounge. “Hi, Tony,” she said. 

Tony was wearing a ballgown with sequins. She rarely wore that kind of thing, but Vegas, Pepper supposed. Her fingers were clasped tight around her knee, and she was sitting carelessly, the edge of the thin dress flapping dangerously up and around her thighs. 

“I’d go with a video,” Tony said, staring into the pool like it was an equation. 

“What?” 

Tony licked her lower lip. She was shaking, but hardly seemed aware of it. “Video. It’s easy to doctor video these days but the press hasn’t really caught onto that. I’d take a video, you’ll get a lot more money out of it that way. It’s better if you want to sell a breakdown.” 

The hotel towels had a blue crown woven into white fabric. They felt stiff, overly cleaned with industrial bleach. Pepper tucked one around Tony’s legs anyway. 

“And why would I do that,” Pepper said. Tony finally looked at her, flickering and uncertain, disguised underneath all her arrogance, but obvious for all that. 

“Missing the Stark Expo because of a drugs binge is pretty good,” Tony said.

“You're not on drugs,” Pepper said, because maybe Tony didn't trust her but Pepper still knew things, like that Tony only used when other people did it and that she faked it half those times anyway. 

Tony looked away. 

“Pretty good spoiled heiress angle, I was wondering what it was gonna be this year. Couldn’t be the making out with that pop star, that story didn’t stick and homophobia was last year's story. Wasn’t buying a dozen cars, I wasn’t drunk enough when I did that. But partying it up in Vegas is always a good sell. Classic.” 

Pepper tucked another towel on top of the first. 

“I thought it was a bad idea when they started designing that reel,” she said. All _Howard Stark_ and _legacy,_ video clips from the past, and then Tony had picked up glass after glass from the waiter’s trays, food untouched on her plate.  

“You should have just told PR,” Tony said.  

“Unfortunately I'm not the boss of PR,” Pepper said.  

“Why not?” Tony asked, looking up at Pepper, unblinking. Under the towels in a dress she looked small. 

“You pay me more here,” Pepper said. 

“Why not just take a video? Plenty of chances, this weekend. It’s ok, you know. I’d understand. It just comes with the territory, at a certain point. It’s worth a lot of money, Ms. Potts. You could get set up with that. It's mostly expected.” 

Pepper breathed in slowly, around the painful sharp feeling suddenly pressing at her ribs from the inside out. To see Tony like this burned on the inside: it was wrong, Tony shaking, nearly limp, too many drinks in to be careful, too far from a family that hadn't known how to be a family, too many years of waiting for the people around her to sell her to the highest bidder. It felt like holding the trigger of a bomb in her hands. Delicate, monumental. 

“If you think I’d sell out on such a bad call and a short-term investment,” Pepper said carefully, “You have really missed how smart I am.”  

Tony _laughed_. It was a manic, terrifying laugh, but it was still a laugh. “Then what’s your investment, Ms. Potts?” 

“Long-term,” Pepper said. 

Tony looked at her again and Pepper saw the faint laughter lines forming at the corner of her eyes, the strong square in her shoulders and the pushing way that she lifted her jaw, always just a little angled. It was like the click of a safety, the latch coming down to block the detonation. 

“This is nice, let's do drugs,” Tony said brightly, of _course_. 

Pepper shook her head and bent over to find Tony’s shoes, tumbled over underneath the chair. “It’s a ten minute walk back to the gala, where you’ll give your demo. And then there will be a car waiting to take you to Red Rocks, with climbing gear, and I’ll find a belayer to watch you lead climb a route. After that you’ll drink a lot of water, and eat exactly what JARVIS sends you, and you will _not_ talk to any press on the way in or out.” 

“The other assistants just sent very expensive hookers to my hotel room,” Tony said, and she was trying her very best to make it sound plaintive, so Pepper pulled a towel away a little bit roughly, but not a particle of her believed it. 

“Well if you _don’t_ want to risk your neck climbing the hardest routes in the dark,” Pepper said, and Tony rolled her eyes, but she was still laughing, and she wasn’t shaking, and her face was moving again, alive. 

“Fine,” Tony said, pushing up out of the chair. 

When the head of PR called the next morning at six am sounding very irritated indeed and asking authorization for a national campaign, Pepper only had herself to blame.  

 

***

 

Pepper knew the downtown office so well she could stare at her pad while she walked through the dark lobby. 

“I’m afraid the power has been contained for the renovations, only backups will be on,” JARVIS said in her ear.  

“I can take the stairs,” Pepper said. It made sense that they scheduled a power down on all the offices while most of the company was celebrating at the gala. JARVIS didn’t actually feel fear, of course, because JARVIS didn’t feel anything, but he had a complex overlay of shifting and training emotions, far superior to any synthetic NLP interface that Pepper had ever encountered. 

She told herself that it made sense. Still, everything felt raw and exposed and unknown. 

Pepper wove through renovations in the dark. Stark Industries was a maze. Somewhere out there, somebody was cutting down hedges.  

“How could we have lost shipments, how could we have made and then lost an entire arms shipment, it doesn’t make any sense,” Pepper said. The remote connection to her central dashboard didn’t show it; those weapons weren’t anywhere in production logs, and nobody had authorized more Jerichos at all. But Pepper knew with an instinctual certainty that they weren’t faked. Christine hadn’t _looked_ like somebody holding up a piece of tabloid fakery, budget photoshop perfectly timed to upset the narrative of Stark Industries’ miraculous transformation. She’d looked mad. She’d looked _disappointed._  

Tony had turned in an instant, depositing Pepper on the edge of the dancefloor and squeezing her hand, so gently it was like it was unconscious. 

“I’ll be back,” Tony had said, before leaving with Christine Everhart. Pepper watched her walk away like a force of nature, anger so clear that the gala had moved away from her. If the Jericho— _multiple Jerichos_ —was in the hands of Ten Rings, then they had firepower far more sophisticated than anybody had anticipated. They could level a city in an hour.  

Pepper had watched Tony go missing enough times to know better. 

JARVIS was silent longer than usual. Pepper dodged around a foam-wrapped beam and headed for the staircase. Her desktop connection would have access to the comprehensive, security-proofed records. 

The stairs were seldom used in a stories-tall skyscraper, hidden behind a thick metal door and lit with blue backup beacons only at the curve. Pepper looked at the curling metal railings, bending and bending to the sky. She took her heels off at the base of the staircase, and went up in bare feet. Tony would be proud. 

“My systems show no aberrations,” JARVIS said. But he sounded doubtful. JARVIS never sounded doubtful. 

“What is it?” Pepper asked. 

“Analyzing,” JARVIS said, and if a soft-spoken artificial intelligence could sound _curt,_ that’s what he sounded. 

“It doesn’t make any sense,” Pepper repeated to herself. But the truth was that she didn’t _know._  

How could anyone know what really went on, in a machine as complex as Stark Industries? The Jericho had been modeled in full digital format before Tony left for the desert, because the military never bought a contract without an engineering inspection in virtual space. That, too, had been a Tony Stark innovation: why manufacture pilot and beta versions when you could render a perfectly convincing replica in 3D space and a simulator? It was how they’d designed and stored every major weapons system, certainly the highest security ones. 

So they’d shut down the production lines, but someone could have made the Jericho. If they had the digital controls. If they had access to the designs. Someone could have manufactured them, maybe, if someone had been able to hide the expenses underneath another large, industrial budget push. But they would have to set it up outside of all the security systems, and _JARVIS_ was the security system.  

Tony had a virtual engineering station in her garage, the only one that existed outside of the Stark Industries campus. Tony had created JARVIS. 

Pepper blinked, and she was at the top floor. Her calves ached, pounding up the stairs faster than she’d realized. 

“Virginia,” JARVIS finally said in her earpiece. He sounded urgent and for once, like a robot. “I can’t reach Stark Systems. I’m shut out.” 

“What?” Pepper said blankly. “What do you—” 

“It’s an unanticipated security protocol,” JARVIS said. “I’m contained to your local ear device and the existing external infrastructure. I can’t follow you on cameras. I can’t reach Tony, or the mansion. I can’t get into the weapons database.” 

“You can’t reach Tony?” Pepper said. It was an icy jolt. Tony disappeared all the time, she reminded herself; Tony hardly kept an in-ear like Pepper did, and if JARVIS was shut out of the mansion and Stark Systems, it was probably all due to the same security glitch.  

“I’ll keep trying,” JARVIS said.

Glitch, right. Glitch like shipping high caliber weapons to terrorists was a glitch. 

“Try hard,” Pepper said. 

“It’s a multilevel encryption pathway that requires a high processing load of analytical backtracking,” JARVIS said. He sounded _pissed._ Pepper smiled, just briefly. 

Pepper stood in the hallway of the top floor and looked at the doors. Obadiah’s office was on the same floor as Tony’s. The floor was only their two offices, which Pepper had always thought rather representative of the structural deficiencies in Stark Industries. Howard and Obadiah were narcissists with their own individual flair for it. Howard had liked to pretend that being head-deep in the engines made him better, and Obadiah had an office hung with folk art like that made the distance of his wealth any easier to bear. 

She looked down at her pad. Her desktop computer, with all its processing power and local connection, would only show her what she’d been looking at for the last three years: Stark Industries as she had been _allowed_ to see it. 

Obadiah’s computer was on his desk. Hilda (Personal Assistant c/o Stane, red Chrysler Pacific, _black coffee_ ) had complained that he never let anyone touch it, not even her, after twenty years of needing to rebook Obadiah’s flights whenever the midwest had a snowstorm. 

“JARVIS, absent your almighty powers, how do we get into this,” Pepper said.

“It’s a separate local machine, it doesn’t even have wifi,” JARVIS said immediately. “High likelihood of advanced security protocols. The only way to bypass Stark Systems in a direct connection is with a limited Stark emergency hardware device coded to the user, manufactured to unlock the machine before the protocols were set in place.”  

“Oh, ok, that’s all, great,” Pepper said. 

“Fortunately, you are wearing one,” JARVIS said. 

 Pepper looked at the ring on her finger. Which had fit like it had been sized for her. Which had sat on the shelf in her office since before everything had changed. Which Tony had given her, without ever saying anything about beyond a smile.  

She pulled the ring off her finger and turned it over. There was a smooth band of metal on the underside of the round, flat adornment. It looked like the entrance to Tony’s mansion. 

Pepper touched her fingertip to the band. There was a slow, quiet click, and then a shrunken line of metal detached smoothly from the inside of the ring and fell into her palm. It was just the size to fit into the USB port on Obadiah’s computer, and when she slid it into the port, the screen sprang to life. A terminal window opened, black on white, and most of it was impenetrable code generating file transfer, but at the top of the window there was a message: _nice hacking, Pep, knew you had it in you_

“I am disassembling the _both of you_ when we get through this,” Pepper said. 

“Now that seems unwarranted,” Obadiah said from the doorway, “Couldn’t we just call IT?” 

He was dressed in a suit, looming in the doorframe. Pepper startled away from the desk, heart pounding, but pulled herself tightly in. She could hear her pulse in her ears. 

“Obadiah,” she said, with a hollow laugh that she immediately regretted, “Oh, you startled me.” She put a hand on her chest, all _dumb secretary,_ “None of the lights will go on and I’ve just been trying to find Tony. I thought her meeting schedule might have been left on your desk, with all the other gala plans,” She put a brightness in her tone, smiled across the room.  

Obadiah walked toward her. In the corner of her eye Pepper saw the flickering bar, _89%, 90%._ God damn. 

Pepper’s heart pounded. Obadiah was half the room away. Pepper reached visibly for papers with one hand, and while she did it, hit the keyboard with a finger, a third-level administration staff class trick for when the boss rounds the corner. Obadiah might have the highest security on the planet and the most power in the city but he still hadn’t changed the _default screensaver keyboard shortcut._  

“Nothing here,” Pepper said, shrugging, “Of course.” 

“A last minute board meeting,” Obadiah said through a rictus of a smile. “Rather secretive, I’m afraid, but I wouldn’t expect her back for a while.” 

Pepper didn’t miss his eyes glancing at the screen. A set of racing cars with stripes down the side. Tony’s touch, Pepper would’ve bet anything on it. 

“Oh, well,” Pepper said. 

“There isn’t anything I should know, Virginia, is there?” Obadiah asked. 

Tony had always ignored the company when she wanted to, had always trusted other people to pick up the pieces and keep her careening entirely out into space. Tony was brilliant and bombastic and ever since her rescue, she’d been building something secret that she wouldn’t talk about. Tony had given her hardware hacking technology without explaining it, and Tony was the only person that Pepper could imagine being able to shut down JARVIS. 

“Not that I know of, I’ll just be heading home,” Pepper said. She hoped she sounded rueful. Obadiah looked dangerous, a mountain of a man leaning over the desk. Pepper felt the breath tight in her chest, and she pushed away from the desk, stood up, and held the tiny data stick tucked in between her thumb and palm. 

"Yes, you should do that," Obadiah said. His eyes flickered back to the screen but it was still nothing, just another racecar, a screensaver. Pepper smiled, and nodded, and started walking. 

 

 ***

 

The thirtieth time Tony went missing, she came back to her Malibu mansion to find Pepper laying stomach-down on a pillow in the living room. 

“Oh no, don’t get up on my account,” Tony laughed, when Pepper startled into awareness of her presence and started to untangle from the blanket and the stacks of earnings reports. The living room got cold in the wind off the ocean, but JARVIS always opened the windows for her. Pepper had been trying to learn how to read the accounting sheets for the last two weeks and she’d printed them off into pdfs and brought them here, to point out discrepancies for Tony to look into. 

Pepper sat up anyway, but pulled the blanket over her lap. She’d only just gotten to some kind of breakthrough in understanding the cashflow and the graphs, and she wanted to finish it. 

Tony looked like she’d been out doing something athletic. Probably racing. She had gloves on, which she peeled off and left on the floor. 

“What’s the latest, is that a bodice ripper?” Tony said. “More graphs than I remember them having.” 

“I already rescheduled your debrief with Rhodey,” Pepper said, not looking up. Tony sounded in a good mood. Pepper approved, generally, of Tony skipping out on work and obligations and humanity to do things like drive stupidly fast cars around a very exclusive track.It was a far sight better than drinking, or heading out in a yacht in full mocking sight of paparazzi.  

Tony flopped down on the other side of the couch, warm and exhausted. There was a scrape going down her arm into her elbow ditch, but it didn’t look deep. Pepper sighed into the pdfs but made no comment. Tony flung herself through the world, and inevitably ricocheted off things.

“Sorry,” Tony said.  

“I thought I heard somebody say something,” Pepper said doubtfully, after a beat. “But I couldn’t possibly have.” 

Tony flipped around on the couch and put her head in Pepper’s lap. 

“Wh—,” Pepper started, and stopped herself. 

“I mean _thank you,”_ Tony said. She had her eyes closed, catlike, and her head slid neatly into the dip of Pepper’s lap, far enough out and toward her knees to be sane, but still close. Pepper tried to act like this was normal, because acting _like this was normal_ was often the best strategy in this job. She resisted the urge to put her hands down or do anything other than hold the earnings report. 

“I thought you could use the afternoon,” Pepper said. Good conditioning required the right connection made from behavior to outcome. Tony had been driven into the ground, more than usual, trying to finish the Jericho _._ Every time Tony talked about it her jokes got sharper and crueler. Pepper didn’t think she’d ever heard Tony say thank you before.  

“This thing is gonna be a real fucking missile,” Tony said. 

They were all missiles, lately. Missiles and drones with auto-guidance systems that got smarter and faster and more multivariate. War was distended through space and time, and Stark Industries had four separate buildings devoted to long range munitions.  

“It’s missiles inside other missiles,” Tony said. “Shrapnel-piercing on a delay that uses algorithmic adjustment to come out at a velocity to pierce whatever material is around, based on an immediate sonar pulse beforehand.” 

Pepper nodded. It sounded genius, and she already knew it was clever from the glee that bubbled around the arms engineers. The Jericho was going to be the biggest order that Pepper had ever seen Stark Industries negotiate, which was why she had started getting into the financial paperwork. It was a big deal design, even in a world where Tony Stark always delivered the _big deal_ designs.  

And Tony hated it. She hated every single thing about it. Pepper looked down at the face in her lap, at Tony’s eyelashes and the faint near-imperceptible lines around her eyes, her nose with three freckles on it, so close that Pepper was conscious of her breathing, trying not to touch.  

“Tony,” Pepper hesitated, but she’d been at Stark Industries for long enough, she’d had Tony’s door coded to her fingerprint for long enough, for long enough that the ocean air and the warm lights of this living room full of Tony’s thoughts had seeped into her skin and sank deep in, next to her bones. “You know, if you really don’t want—” 

“Shhh,” Tony said, waggling a finger in the air, “Do you hear that, Pep?”  

“What,” Pepper said. 

“Exactly,” Tony said. She grinned, rich-person-white-teeth but that sideways smile that was all her own, and Pepper felt something flip over between her ribs. 

Pepper didn’t put down the earnings analysis report, but she only needed one hand to hold it--and the projections were probably bullshit anyway, she needed to have a word with finances if they thought that no one was looking at their lack of confidence intervals--so she let her other hand rest on Tony’s head, tangling her fingers in Tony’s hair. There was a vicious bruise on the curve of her neck, like a press of metal into the tender join of skin and collarbone. Tony flung herself at the world, and the world was always so unyielding.  

“No one’s ever done that,” Tony mumbled. She was already half-gone. “Why you gotta be so nice, Pep?”  

Pepper opened her mouth, but Tony was asleep, so she closed it again. 

Most of the time, Pepper felt inured to the fact that Tony was fucking gorgeous. Most of the time, Pepper felt like she watched the haywire, unpredictable path of Tony’s mind more than she ever watched her body _._ But there was something about Tony like this, uncharacteristically still on the couch, the long lines of her legs cutting a contrast with the upholstery, the white fold of her shirt contrasting with her black hair, like Tony was a creature of opposition.  

Her hair was soft, and her skin was so warm under Pepper’s fingertips. 

When she was twelve, Tony Stark had built a new kind of circuit and left it on the kitchen counter to be nearly thrown away by the cook. When she was twenty, Tony Stark had a seat at every technology committee on the planet. Between eighteen and twenty-eight, Tony Stark had built a new weapon every year despite trying to get as far away from her own brain as hedonism would allow. Since she was fifteen, a thousand magazine spreads had published stupid, shitty, voyeuristic things about her looks. 

Tony never seemed anything other than in command, of her sex appeal, of her genius, of her impossible ego. And Pepper had a wall up in her own mind against all of those things because it was the only way that she could be everything that _Tony needed,_ competent and perfect and never, ever distracted, so that she could pick up all the pieces, as much as she could, as much as Tony needed. 

But here, like this, just the two of them together, none of that seemed as real as the Tony asleep in her lap. The Tony who had fifteen rooms in this Malibu cliff mansion but only used two of them: the downstairs engineering lab and this living room, with its windows in every direction looking out to the sea. 

Tony Stark was everywhere and nowhere, terribly special and specially terrible, and Pepper wondered how nobody else, out of all of them, had ever thought to run their fingers through her hair. 

 

***

 

“Odds that I’m getting fired,” Pepper said, walking faster than she’d ever walked in her life without actually running. Running seemed suspicious, and Obadiah felt like a shadow at her back, like he’d come down the stairs. The back lobby was dark and silent. Pepper dodged a column, and tried not to startle at the echo of her own footsteps. She had no idea where her shoes had gotten. Tony would be proud. 

“It would be a waste of my considerable resources to calculate trivially small possibilities,” JARVIS said stoutly. “I have identified exactly one Stark Systems access point that I can access. It must be a backup, outside normal protocols. If you get there and transfer the data, Virginia, I can access the files you've captured.”

“And find Tony with that?” Pepper asked.

“It’s a start,” JARVIS said. 

The access point was in the garage. More precisely, the access point was in an Acura NSK concept car, custom-painted with red flames shooting down the sides.  

“Why did I expect anything else,” Pepper said. The car unlocked when she got to five feet away. She slid into the driver’s seat, and a ring of interior lights turned on, all red, outlining the dashboard. It was sleek and full of dials and didn’t look remotely like a computer, but there was a small port instead of a keyhole, blinking yellow. 

Pepper breathed in. It smelled like leather, and a little bit like ginger. Tony hadn’t told Pepper what she was doing, not really, not this whole time since she’d come back from the desert. Stark Industries was vast and monolithic and at this precise moment it felt _empty—_ just Pepper in a slippery blue dress and bare feet, with a robot in her ear telling her what to do. Tony had manipulated people around her on far less, on nothing but charm and a strong whiskey. Tony was keeping a secret, and Pepper didn’t know what it was, and _someone_ was dealing arms to terrorists and using all of Stark Industries as a cover.  

The building was dark, like a mountain on top of them. Pepper had the disorienting feeling that if Obadiah brought it all down, she would be buried in the rubble in the garage. He'd looked like he was heading somewhere. He'd had a bag and a sharp look on his face, like he was honing in on something. Pepper had gone out the back, and down to the furthest garage, where all the administrative assistants parked. Tony had put her car here instead of on the executives' level. If Obadiah was driving out now, he'd be on top of them. Tony had chosen this car's location for a reason. 

“Transfer the data,” JARVIS said, a machine built by Tony. “I’ll analyze it.”  

Obadiah had said _emergency board meeting_ and Pepper knew a lie when she heard one, regardless of who was doing what, regardless of what masks everyone around her wore. The fact was that Tony was _missing._ When Tony went missing, Pepper found her.  

“I am trusting you,” Pepper whispered, kind of a prayer, kind of a decision, and she plugged the stick in. 

 

***

 

The Acura NSK concept car was a shell built on top of an automated analysis system and a detached server that duplicated Stark Systems down to an impressive level. It wouldn’t getthe processing speed that JARVIS was accustomed to, but it was workable. 

“I’m happy for you, _where is Tony,_ ” Pepper said. 

“Connecting,” JARVIS chirped, sounding gleeful. It turned out that a cloned Stark Systems gave JARVIS the ability to convince the security systems that he was already inside the permissions layer, an elegant solution that had Tony’s fingerprints all over it.  

“Are you at a board meeting,” Pepper yelled, when _Antonia Stark_ projected in green 3D letters on the dashboard. She couldn’t tell where the car was taking them, only that the speedometer was going to give her a heart attack. “What the fuck is going on?” 

“It’s Obadiah, he’s been selling weapons to the terrorists behind our backs, Pep, you have to get away from him,” Tony gasped. She sounded ragged on the edges, like she’d been running a race.

“I _know,”_ Pepper said, “Are you ok? What have you not been telling me?” 

“Long story, I’m fine, Obadiah brought me back to the mansion, just a little chest surgery, nothing major, happy you called,” Tony said. “I need you to do something, I need some files that are going to be only on Obadiah’s computer, we’re going to need the evidence _—”_

“I am grounding you for three months,” Pepper hissed. “And I’ve already got the files.”  

“Files analysis eighty-three percent complete and in process of simultaneously uploading to Rhodey,” JARVIS said, sounding data-pleased in the way that only he could. 

“Really shouldn’t…underestimate…you,” Tony said, and that was definitely a gasp, like she was running out of air. There was a sucking, metallic clicking noise on the line, and something like a pained yelp. 

“Are you hurt?” Pepper said, ice in her veins. “Did someone hurt you? Where are you?” 

“Oh, paralyzed on the floor for a few hours but better now. Let’s just say I’m glad I keep souvenirs of early prototypes,” Tony said. 

“Oh,” JARVIS said, and then, “Virginia, my apologies.” 

The car roared to life. Pepper gripped the edge of the driver’s seat. The car had roared into life, engines rattling the hood. It accelerated, zero to sixty in a blink, wound up the sloped garage entrance and shot out onto the street. The tires squealed on the road. 

Pepper’s whole life flashed before her eyes. Too many long meetings and not enough thai takeout. 

“Automated guidance systems,” JARVIS said apologetically, “Built in, I’m afraid.” 

Pepper realized she was pounding the brake pedal. The city streets sped past in a blur of blue and yellow lights and honking, distressed bystanders. The car was a monster, a dragon, a missile shooting into the night, and she was riding it in nothing but a ballgown. 

“Tell. Me. What’s. Happening,” Pepper said. 

“Analysis complete,” JARVIS said, “Antonia, it is worse than we feared. Obadiah is at the experimental arc reactor, and he’s going to use your former device to power his suit, and to initiate the full reactor.” 

“There’s _another reactor?”_ Pepper said. 

“Obadiah and I were working on one. Thought it could….power….the city. Well…underestimating people…seems to be…the theme of the day,” Tony said. Her voice sounded stronger, although she was still speaking in gasps, like she’d had the wind knocked out of her several times over.  

“Technically there are several, but only Tony's body devices have worked,” JARVIS said, “According to these files, Obadiah began secret construction on a suit shortly after arranging for your abduction. He’s had a suit for four months, but could not power it until tonight. My strategic analysis indicates a high likelihood that Obadiah will attempt to power the city reactor tonight with the stolen device.” 

“He stole my suit?” Tony gasped at the same time as Pepper yelled, “He tried to _kill you?”_

“The big reactor will explode,” Tony said, voice scratchy through the car audio. “We couldn’t get the tech to scale, that’s why we abandoned it. People will die.”  

“The automated guidance has detected the highest security clearance at Stark Industries, and is trying to take the detonation override to the arc reactor,” JARVIS said. He sounded apologetic again. 

“So we’re going to pick up Tony,” Pepper said. The car was still driving itself, melting around obstacles and gliding past all the other traffic. 

“Actually I’ll get my own ride tonight,” Tony said. Her voice sounded tight and worried. “JARVIS, override that car. Have it drop Pepper at home. That’s an order.” 

“You are not facing Obadiah on your own,” Pepper said. Anger and fear melded together in her chest and it didn’t matter, didn’t matter that Obadiah was a monster and a sociopath and a terrorist, he had gone after _her people, her company, Tony._ “And what do you mean, he stole your suit? From the gala, you were wearing it,” 

“I cannot facilitate override,” JARVIS said, “Clearance outstrips my permissions. You built this in, Antonia.”  

“God _fucking_ damn it,” Tony said, “I didn't build it thinking it would take her to a murderer! I want her out of there!”  

“Will you two robots explain _anything,”_ Pepper said. They’d made their way through downtown and the car was shooting out to the highway. The speedometer was too frightening to look at.

“I’m sorry,” Tony said. “You’re the security clearance override, Pep. You’re the one who can shut down the arc reactor. I’m sorry. It wasn’t a protocol that was supposed to send you into danger. I’m coming. Hold on. I’m coming.”  

“Stop it, _you_ can’t face him, Obadiah is--” Pepper said, and stopped herself, didn't say  _a mad man with bombs_ or  _a criminal mastermind who fooled us all_ or  _the only family you've thought you had_. The city lights were dimming in the distance and they were headed out, out, out into the industrial warehouse spaces, where Tony and Obadiah must have cleared away an old Stark Industries holding lab to try out the experimental tech. Obadiah was headed there too. It felt suddenly inevitable, two weights falling through space on intersecting lines, destined to meet.  

“I can,” Tony said, “I have to. Get to the second floor of the building, there’s a control room with a trigger switch. I need you to give the arc reactor permission to shut down with your key. I’ll be there in two minutes.” 

The car had turned off the highway, barreled past an intersection, and flung itself into the parking lot of a gigantic industrial structure. The building rose in front of her, glass-plated and Stark-arrogant. 

“What key? To _do what,”_ Pepper said, frantic, because Tony had lived an entire life with no one ever telling her _no,_ without a safety net or a guard rail or a goddamn boundary. “Wait for Rhodey. Call the police. You can’t _fight him,”_

“I'm a different person now,” Tony said. “I’ve been meaning to tell you. Well no. No I'm not a different person. I can't be a different person, because I'm a narcissist and a genius so I can always talk myself out of change. But I'm doing _different things._ I've got my old arc reactor, JARVIS, power us up." 

There was a rushing noise on the mic, like Tony was talking to her through air. Like Tony was falling. 

“How can you possibly think you can fix everything by yourself?” Pepper said.

“Because I watch you!” Tony said. 

A light turned on in the warehouse, like a monster waking up and opening one golden eye. 

 

***

 

The experimental arc reactor was at the back of the building, enclosed in glass walls and thick metal pillars.  

“Not suspicious at all,” Pepper whispered to herself, “Doesn’t look evil at all.” She crept along the wall, bare feet quiet on the cold floor. There was a humming light and the sound of machinery. Obadiah had to be here somewhere, but she couldn’t see anyone. 

“Tony is in the air,” JARVIS said in her ear. Pepper glanced at the ceiling. If Tony crashed a _goddamn plane_ into this building, there wouldn’t be enough thai food in the world to make up for it. 

There were stairs, leading up to the control room. Pepper eyed them, and gauged the distance, and started moving.  

And suddenly the building _moved._ It was a thick sheet of metal, detaching from the wall. No, it was a monster, gleaming eyes. It was the Iron Man, but _wrong,_ massively tall and plated like a tank, grey metal reflecting eerie white lights. It was a mask, a bomb come to life, a weapon. And it was standing right in front of her.  

“Now where do you think you’re going,” Obadiah said.  

“Oh, _suit,”_ Pepper said. 

“Your services are no longer required,” Obadiah said, raising a pillar-wide arm and pointing it at Pepper. A thick ratcheting barrel of ammunition locked into place. 

“You won’t get away with this,” Pepper said. The stairs were too far away, and the monster suit was too big—Pepper couldn’t get around him. “We’ve got the evidence against you.”  

“Evidence!” Obadiah scoffed. She could hear the humorless smile that must be on his face. “I’m afraid this is beyond even your powers. You disappoint me. I thought we understood each other.”  

“You’ve gone insane,” Pepper said. Tony was still coming, and Pepper could only pray that Rhodey would get here in time.  

“Useless,” Obadiah spat. The ammunitions clicked, a targeting function locking on. Pepper felt ice shoot through the pit of her stomach. She was surprisingly calm, a thick, settled kind of calm. “What you fail to understand is that we play a vital part in this world, Virginia. The world will always need weapons.” 

“The world needs _tools,”_ Pepper said, “That arc reactor will blow as soon as you try to power it,”  

Obadiah moved. It was terrifying, a mountainous leg bracing into the concrete, ripping a trench into it. He was bracing to fire. Pepper looked at the ring on her hand. There was no way she could throw it all the way to the control room, and it needed her signature to lock out the arc reactor anyway. 

“You see what I mean,” Obadiah said, “You and Tony, you lack _vision._ The arc reactor isn’t for energy. It’s the world’s next bomb. Tonight’s little demonstration will show the world that. And the mess will all go to Tony. The board already has proof in hand that she’s passing the Jericho to Ten Rings. She'll go to jail, and I'll get the company, no matter what you do tonight." 

Pepper shook her head, slowly. It was enough of a surprise that Obadiah stopped.  

“You want to know how I figured out it was you?” Pepper asked. “I checked with third level administration staff. You'd hid all the schedules from JARVIS but you still needed somebody to pick you up from the airport, and Hilda has a salad with Janice every single day at twelve-thirty, who has handled your passport for twenty years. Called them at the gala. They’re in protective custody. Testifying against you. You can blow me up, you still won’t change that. No matter what _you_ do tonight.” 

“What, _fuck you, you bitch,”_ Obadiah roared, and then the Iron Man crashed through the skyscraper grade glass wall, sweeping into the monstrous suit, and knocking him a clear half building over. 

“The arc reactor has already been powered,” JARVIS said in her in-ear. 

“Get _out of here_ ,” the Iron Man yelled. At her. 

“No,” Pepper said, frozen and staring. Obadiah flung a mighty arm through space, and the Iron Man met it with a clang of thruster-powered alloy. They grappled, knocking into pipes and bending work stations around them. Now that she was seeing it in person, the suit was oddly familiar. It was the ratio of shoulder to spinal support, the reinforcement tagged to a lower center of gravity than all the other weapons suits Pepper had seen from working with Rhodey. 

She remembered those adjustments. She'd _made_ those adjustments, a thousand experimental body armor suits repurposed for women in nursing homes. Pepper went from suspicion to clarity in an instant, world remade. 

It turned out that it was obvious not because Pepper knew engineering or knew patterns or knew the mechanics of things like Tony did, in and out of them like she was some kind of xray instead of a human brain. It turned out that it was obvious because Pepper knew _Tony._  

“I can’t believe you,” Pepper said. JARVIS must be relaying the audio into Tony’s suit, because the Iron Man shrugged. She could almost see the laugh in it.  

The Iron Man—Woman-- _Tony_ —hit Obadiah’s suit with a gigantic crash. Obadiah fell backwards through the wall, rubble piling in on his head.  

“Hey uh, you should run, babe, I’ll handle this,” Tony said through the mask and the armor and the voice synth and the _goddamn insanity._

“We are _talking_ about this _later_ ,” Pepper said. 

Obadiah was slow moving in the gigantic suit, butsomething was charging. There was an ominous hum of rear thrusters charging up, and lights burst into the heels of the vast metallic boots. 

“Absolutely,” Tony said, and then she was flying.  

Pepper booked it up the stairs, battle raging behind her. The control panel was just like a thousand other interfaces she’d seen throughout Stark Industries, keys and engineering tools littered everywhere. The arc reactor buzzed, flooding the warehouse with light. 

“Don’t think I’m not including you,” Pepper said. 

“I'm sincerely sorry to have kept you in the dark,” JARVIS said. “I advised against it. Ignition is left of the temperature dials.” 

“Those would be the ones spinning up into the red zone with the huge DANGER sign on top,” Pepper said. She slid her finger on the pad, and a panel slid down to reveal a depression in the metal, just the right shape to drop a ring into, with contact points all around. Then she hesitated. 

On the floor, Obadiah had flung Tony backward into the wall. The suits slammed together in a terrific chaos, scattering sparks. 

“Tony,” Pepper said.  

“Shut it down, I’m fine,” Tony yelled back. Tony was definitely not fine. Obadiah’s suit was bigger and stronger and built specifically to out-spec Tony’s. Obadiah had left Tony out in the desert to die, had tied her to a lab and a garage and a company built around death. Obadiah was flinging shrapnel at Tony’s suit, and some of them were piercing the armor. The thing in Tony’s chest looked wrong, dim, dimmer than the one in Obadiah’s chest. 

Pepper looked down at the controls. Pepper had followed Tony through a dozen engineering labs and twenty military test stations, she had gotten yelled at by thirty heads of engineering and read a thousand spec reports on the technology that Tony had dreamed up.She knew _Stark tech._ She knew Tony well enough to see the logic even in the machines that she didn’t understand. Obadiah had set the arc reactor to burn at maximum load, but he was pulling energy steadily for his suit. The reactor in his suit was powering both the suit and the arc reactor.  

“The arc reactor, if we let it cycle through a self-destruct, it could overload his suit,” she realized. “JARVIS, couldn’t it,” 

“It is possible,” JARVIS said, after a beat of a million calculations, “It would compromise the arc reactor, but there’s no guarantee the blast radius would not extend to you.”  

“Don’t do that, just shut it down,” Tony yelled across the room and through being strangled by a gigantic robotic fist. She was losing. She swung sideways, caught Obadiah’s helmet in a heel kick, and must have damaged the optics because one of the lights flared out. It bought a moment, but not enough. Obadiah launched another weapon and it threw Tony against the wall again. The building shook.

Pepper was _done_ with letting Tony go. She reset the controls, dropped the ring into the contact ditch, and slid her finger onto the panel. 

“Voice authorization required, Stark Industries highest authority,” the panel droned. 

Tony flew—her suit was faster and lighter in the air. But it was a feint. Tony dodged a terrifying arm and led Obadiah back. Tony flew over Obadiah’s head toward the arc reactor. Obadiah roared, anger and malice and hate, and followed. She was leading Obadiah right into the blast zone. He was on top of it, grasping the edge of the reactor, balancing uncertainly, sucked toward the vortex. And Tony was on top of him, holding him down. 

“Promise me you built the better armor,” Pepper said.  

“Voice authorization accepted, Pepper Potts,” the panel said, and the arc reactor pulsed, and Pepper _ran._    
  
  
***  
  


Everything was silent. Pepper had been knocked to the ground of the parking lot, and there was shattered glass and a pile of rubble and the arc reactor like a burnt socket, blackened and incinerating itself from the inside. Her ears rang, buzzed, reset. The sky was smudged with the suggestion of stars. She blinked against the afterimage of the blast. 

The blast had carried the building down with it. Obadiah’s suit was frozen in rubble, like a lost monument from an ancient civilization. He didn't move. 

“You are in so much trouble,” Pepper said. 

“I calculate that Rhodey is six minutes out,” JARVIS said. “Stark Systems is back online. Rhodey is bringing friends.”  

“You too. This is insane. You’re absolutely insane,” Pepper said.  

“Ok, I deserve that,” Tony said, blinking through dust, limping across the parking lot. Pepper crossed her arms over her chest and glared. Flightless, Tony’s suit was still a marvel, gold and wires and plates with long, terrifying scoring down the sides. 

“You,” Pepper said. “ _You_ have been doing this. All of this.”  

“I had this realization that we were the bad guys,” Tony said. “All of us. Dad, mom, me. I had this realization that I was supposed to _build things._ Not break them.”  

“The world isn't your garage,” Pepper said. But if she was fighting it was only sham, because there was Tony in a gleaming suit and obviously it was hot rod red. Pepper was going to give Rhodey _such_ a hard time for not knowing it was Tony, unrelentingly and for years.  

“What if the world could be a garage,” said Tony, a genius, an idiot, a crazy person, a vigilante with delusions of grandeur, a neglected kid who had only ever been able to feel like a human being when she was in the middle of machines. 

And _that was the thing,_ Pepper thought. That was the infuriating, impossible thing, that Tony was dangerous in every form and powerful for her brilliance and invaluable for her designs, but it was when she _cared_ that you lost all hope of resisting. 

“You have five minutes until Rhodey gets here, to convince me to stay on your side,” Pepper said, defeated, rushing, surfing the wake. 

Tony stepped up to her with gleaming eyes, so close Pepper could nearly taste her sweat and skin through the metal in the air, like a lightning bolt had hit a sports car, like a star had grazed a rocketship. 

“What if, Pep. I could've said this whole thing is fucked and we're selling a perpetual motion merry-go-round of war and all the while people are dying but _nobody would ever listen_. What if Stark Industries didn't try to end the military industrial complex. What if it decided to _eat it?_ What if the largest company in the world poured its money into aid? What if we made _the market_ compete to pull out of the complex? What if I made the one weapon they couldn't refuse?”

“You're not enough, just you,” Pepper said. 

“I don't know,” Tony said. “Maybe someday… Maybe there will be more people like me out there. What if Stark Industries does something different, makes itself a platform. What if we take all their money and we give it away to the people who will only ever use it for good. What if.” 

“You're talking about something that doesn't exist,” Pepper said. 

“Yeah, always,” Tony beamed at her. There was a trickle of blood running down the side of her beautiful face. The mask and the helmet was dangling from her hand. She was like an archetype, something not real, a vision painted on the side of building to represent a fantasy. 

“The Iron Man is...it's amazing, Tony, but it's not, I mean, a thousand things could go wrong, _will definitely go wrong,_ ” Pepper said and she could already think them through, fleets of fighter jets batting Tony out of the sky, enemies grasping for the heart of her, someone else willing to make a bigger bomb, because every time, there was someone willing to make a bigger bomb. 

“The suit isn't the weapon,” Tony said. “The weapon is the _idea.”_

Pepper looked out at the wreckage. It was almost beautiful, shattered glass and metal bent like flower stalks. The cops were coming off the highway, red and blue lights shimmering in the dry night air of LA. 

“The idea of changing things,” Pepper said, and Tony nodded. 

“That somebody could be a superhero. People will believe in it. Something that doesn't exist _yet_.”

“That's a lot to bet on, that's a big _if,”_ Pepper said. “The board thinks you’re a criminal. Obadiah was setting you up to fall, and get blamed for all of it. We got the files off his computer but the government, you know…it’s going to be madness.” 

“Obadiah only held Howard’s stock in trust,” Tony said. She sounded detached, almost aloof, looking at the twisted, sharded ruins of the gigantic suit. Obadiah was in there, somewhere.  

“It reverts to the board,” Pepper said automatically, blankly, before realizing that there it was. Obadiah and Howard had structured the company for at least some kind of balance, which was why the Starks had never owned Stark Industries outright. Pepper had always wondered about it. Obadiah had only executed Howard’s portion of the stock because Tony had never cared, but in the event of one of their deaths, the stock became valueless and a secondary ownership agreement took place. 

“Yeah, unless the agreement is void,” Tony said. 

“That’s what he was threatening you with, when you started saying we wouldn’t sell weapons,” Pepper realized. “He was going to take you out of the company altogether, just by arguing that you were acting against its interests.” 

“You were holding him off on legal means,” Tony said, softly. “You bought me time. You were _making the company lucrative anyway.”_

“What are you _saying_ ,” Pepper spluttered. She was too outraged to be calm and offended by the way that Tony was still _looking at her_ like she was supposed to be keeping up with this, this insanity, Tony Stark in a red-gold bodysuit looking like the front page of a comic book and of course, _of course_ some lunacy of Stark Industries paperwork coming back up to shape the future.  

“The agreement gets voided if the board votes you out of the company or if you commit a crime,” Tony said. “Which, Obadiah did, triggering his dilution clause. Or at least I’m reasonably certain that plotting to kill me will count as a crime, despite the gross unfairness of that general valuing of life compared to everybody else on this planet, but there’s always the decimation of the arc reactor to fall back on.” 

Pepper sat down hard on the one concrete block that wasn’t covered in shattered glass. Above them, the LA sky was dimly dark and somewhere there were probably even stars. 

“You’re saying you’re the majority owner of Stark Industries again,” she said. 

Tony, perpetual heir to an empire she’d never chosen, shrugged one shoulder. The stiff one. Stark Industries—well, Tony, if at this point the difference mattered—could do anything at all that it wanted, if they no longer had to think about the rigid oversight of the profit-fixated board members. Some part of Pepper’s brain made a note to invest in an onsite physical therapist that Tony would actually trust. _Several._

No more backroom strategy. No more side contracts on fuel lines that _probably_ weren’t going to be weaponized. The majority owner of Stark Industries could do anything they wanted. Research and development on a scale the country hadn’t seen since Howard Stark locked himself in a bunker with Peggy Carter and laid out a ten-year post-war plan. Medical investment, and aid. They could turn it all into aid, that too. 

“You can do all of it,” Pepper said. “You actually…you want to turn Stark Industries into something that funds… _Iron Man._ You actually get to run it all.” 

“Actually,” Tony said casually. “I committed a lot of crimes too, and I’m pretty sure I’m not gonna keep that under wraps. But I altered my dilution trigger, which dad only gave _me_ the option to do, as long as it goes to someone who isn’t related to me, who’s leadership at Stark, and who’s ready to take the whole thing over. So Obadiah’s diverts to me, and mine diverts to the person I chose.” 

Absurdly, the only person that Pepper could think of was JARVIS, and JARVIS wasn’t a legal person. But then Tony leant from one foot to the other, a dancing little step like they were back on the floor of the gala. And she was looking at Pepper with that dynamite grin, beautiful lightning bolt Tony Stark, with oil in her hair and glass shards sliding off the joints of her homemade armor.  

“No,” Pepper said. “No, you didn’t,” 

“I'm making a long-term investment,” Tony said. 

“You’re insane,” Pepper gasped. 

“Well,” Tony shrugged. 

“ _When?”_ Pepper said. She could barely get it out. 

Tony shrugged again. She was still grinning _._ “Oh I dunno. Years ago. Let’s say, about seven and a half months after you came here. After the first time you ignored that obnoxious reminder you keep pinging yourself with. Wanted you to _choose,_ after all.” 

“You're the worst,” Pepper said. 

“And you're the best,” Tony said, “The best there is. You're a genius and I can't do any of it without you. I don't wanna do it without you telling me what to do every step of the way. Tony Stark, care of Pepper Potts. You’re the only one who can do it.”  

There are worse things, Pepper thought, than falling in love with the way someone saw the world.

Pepper glared. She stepped closer. The world was coming into sharper focus, the blast fading. Her feet were covered in grime and gravel and she looked, probably, like Tony Stark for once. “You're going to need more of a plan than turning a company upside down and shaking it. You're going to need long term economic support on a scale this country has never seen, and you're going to need to convince both parties to be on your side. You're going to need to create the whole thing, we don't even know what it is yet. You're going to need someone to replace Obadiah, a real partner, a stealth leader who can run this whole impossible logistic _machine,_ someone who can build the _future--”_

“Right,” Tony said, leaning close and in, intoxicating and so much the center of what Pepper could see, of everything that she wanted to be a part of, “Right, that's exactly what I thought.”  

Pepper grabbed at the unyielding metallic joints of the insane suit. She held tight, fingers slipping into the ridges at Tony’s elbows, curling against the bars of reinforced armor. She expected it to be cold but it was warm, warm through.  

“You tell me where you’re going, every time,” Pepper said. “You call me before you go.” 

“You’re the boss,” Tony said, more delighted than Pepper had ever seen her, armored hands careful around Pepper’s waist, and Pepper pushed forward, leaned into the world’s most dangerous weapon, and kissed her. 

 

***

 

Pepper Potts’ interview was supposed to be with assorted heads of marketing and communication as well as a Stark Industries event lead and an attorney. Pepper assumed that attorneys were present at every Stark Industries interview for anything that got remotely close to Tony, poised and waiting with vicious NDAs and blinding smiles. 

But instead Tony Stark herself sat across the table in a pair of designer sunglasses and last night's suit, her feet up on the table like it was the dashboard of one of her sports cars. Pepper had seen her plenty of times on the news and yet it still knocked the wind out of her for a second. She was just too vivid in person, some part of her always moving, looking at you like she could sequence your genome if she thought hard enough about it.  

Pepper endured exactly twenty-five minutes of roundabout, non sequitor questions on everything from corporate finance to chauffeuring to atomic physics before she folded her arms, gave Tony Stark her absolutely least impressed face, and said, “Why don’t you get around to asking what you really wanted to ask me?” 

Tony blinked, looked fifteen years younger than her age for an endearing second, and Pepper thought, _oh, no._

“You’re smart,” Tony said. “You’re smarter than all of those jackals from your MBA, and what’s rarer, you work hard. And you seem, by some miracle, like you’re not a complete psychopath. You could have any number of jobs. You could have a better job than this. Why should you be here?” 

“Your last three personal assistants quit in under a year,” Pepper said. “One of them wrote a memoir. One of them outed you and got an international interview circuit out of it. One of them is living very happily on the coast of Florida with a payout that seems rather extraordinary for an employee who worked for you for three months.” 

Tony’s entire mouth twitched. It wasn’t a smile, it wasn’t much of anything, but Pepper felt that she had captured something far more rare than Tony’s humor: her full attention. 

“So you did your homework, that makes you good, doesn’t answer my question,” Tony said.  

“You’ve been hiring the wrong people,” Pepper said, and she was possibly taking her life and future career in her hand and dangling them over the open mouth of an extremely beautiful tiger, but it was a mistake when people thought that Pepper couldn’t take a risk, just because she took them carefully, and consideringly, and at the exact right moment. 

“I jumped through all your stupid, manipulative interview hoops, because it seemed like somebody should tell you that.”  

“So tell me who the right person is,” Tony said. 

Pepper thought of the formal portraits on the wall in the downstairs lobby, the parents whose faces never smiled, and the woman in front of her who found a thousand new ways to be alone. The Starks ran through every industry in the country, through the history of technology itself, like the royal family in a fairytale. But who ever wanted to be the protagonist in one of those?

“I’m too conscientious for consulting, I’m not ambitiously blind enough to waste a decade chasing some director’s office in white collar, and I don’t enjoy working for psychopaths, so that cut out government and most of high tech,” Pepper said. 

“You might not be in luck with that last one,” Tony said, but quietly, like she didn’t want to interrupt her. 

“I don’t think so,” Pepper said. “Honestly, I don’t know if I want this job. But it seems interesting to find out. Sometimes it feels like things are changing in the world, and I want to be where that starts. One name always comes up for that, and it’s the one on your stationary. I can’t do what you can do, nobody can do what you can do, but you need somebody who can _help_ you do what you do.” 

“And I’ll never lie to you,” Pepper added, thinking it out and feeling it, all the way through the floor and to the earth below, like a magnet locking into a pole. “I'm the only one who can do this job.” 

“Well, Virginia Potts,” Tony said, and her face was bright, alive, _on,_ “Let’s find out, shall we?” 

“You can call me Pepper,” Pepper said. 


End file.
